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WRITINGS

OF

SEYERN TEACILE WALLIS

MEMORIAL EDITION

VOL. I
ADDRESSES AND POEMS

BALTIMORE

JOHN MUKPHY & CO.

1896

fiC

I

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION : — PAGE.

Prefatory, v

Biographical, viii

ADDRESSES : —

Leisure : its Moral and Political Economy, ... - 3
Valedictory to the Graduating Class of the University of Mary-
land, 41

Discourse on the Life and Character of George Peabody, 63

Address to the Law Class of the University of Maryland, - 103

Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of Chief Justice Taney, 139

Address on behalf of the Lee Memorial Association, - - 151
Address delivered before the Schools of Art and Design of the

Maryland Institute, - - - - - - - 167

Address at the Eighth Annual Commencement of the McDonogh

Institute, 193

The Johns Hopkins University in its Relations to Baltimore, 217

Notes, - 247

POEMS : —

The Blessed Hand, 255

A Prayer for Peace, 258

The Last of the Hours, 261

Truth and Eeason, 263

Beauty and Faith, 265

The Exile's Prayer, 267

The First Grave, - - - - 268

The Spectre of Colalto, ....... 270

In Fort Warren, 277

iii

iv CONTENTS.

PAGE.

Worship, . . - • • - - * - - 278

Dreams, - - .... . - . . - - 280

Life, - - - - - ... . . - 283

Christmas, - 289

Christmas— 1851, ... . .... - 290

Christmas Eve at Sea, - 292

To an Infant, - • • • 294

Memnon, - - . „ . 298

God's Acre— Friedhof, 299

Starlight, 299

Quo Fata Trahunt, 300

For an Album, 301

For an Album, - - - 302

Dejection, - - - . - - - - - - 304

To a Friend, - - - - ..... 306

To the Same, - - - . ....".. - 309

To a Friend, . 310

No More ! - . - 312

The Curfew, • .„. - • - - - - - - 314

Midnight, - - . - - - . - - 315

The Fount, - - - - - - - - - - 317

To , .......... 318

... .."..; . 319

..... . - - . - 320

.... . . 323

. . . - . - . .,.- 324

.... . . •- . % 325

. . . - - - - -330

..... . . 330

. . . . . .332

. . . . . 333

- . ." - 335

INTRODUCTION.

PREFATORY.

present edition is the first collection of the scattered
1 writings in prose and verse, literary, critical and political,
of the late Severn Teackle Wallis, who died in Baltimore, April 11,
1894. Its publication now is due to the earnest desire of a number
of his personal friends, in the first place, to possess such a complete
collection of his writings, and secondly, to their belief that the people
of Maryland, and all who knew him, will be glad to have such a
permanent memorial of his useful, active life, and of his many and
various gifts and accomplishments. Not long before his death,
Mr. Wallis had printed at his own expense, for distribution among
some of his intimate friends, a limited edition of the Addresses, Lec-
tures and Reviews, which form part of the contents of the first
volume of this edition. Very soon after his death, there was held
in Baltimore a meeting which resulted in the formation of a Wallis
Memorial Association, one of the specified objects of which was
the publication of a Memorial Edition of his writings, to be
followed, in time, if the funds of the Association should prove
sufficient, by the erection of a Memorial bust or statue in his
honor in some appropriate public place in the city of Baltimore,
and by the foundation of one or more scholarships or prizes to bear
his name and perpetuate his memory.

vi INTRODUCTION.

With this view, officers of the Association were elected, Execu-
tive and Finance Committees appointed, and subscriptions were
received.

The response to the circular issued by the Association setting
forth its objects, being deemed sufficiently encouraging to justify
the Association in undertaking the present publication, Messrs.
Thomas W. Hall, Arthur George Brown and John J. Donaldson
were requested to act as a Publishing Committee, and authorized
to make the necessary arrangements for editing and printing.
The Committee were fortunate enough to secure at the outset,
the valuable services of Dr. William Hand Browne, Professor
of English Literature in the Johns Hopkins University, to see
the entire work through the press, and the Committee here desire
to express their high appreciation of the value of Dr. Browne's
assistance, and of the care and fidelity with which he has per-
formed the labor assigned to him.

In addition to the Lectures, Addresses and Reviews, collected
and privately circulated in the lifetime of Mr. Wallis, as already
mentioned, the first volume of this edition contains a number of
short poems and occasional verses written at various times and
in varying moods, which have never before been collected, and
many of which have never before been printed. These are now
published as they appear in a manuscript volume, in which in his
later years, and after evident careful correction and revision, they
had been transcribed in Mr. Wallis's own neat and characteristic
hand-writing. The only liberty taken by the Editor, has been
the omission in some instances of proper names and initials;
while the notes, which were originally prefixed by Mr. Wallis to
some of the poems, have been printed together at the end of
the volume.

The second volume is devoted to a selection from Mr. Wallis's
political writings of a permanent and historical character, prefer-

INTRODUCTION. vii

ence being given to those prepared by him, while a member of
the Maryland Legislature in 1861, not only because of the light
•which they throw upon the events of that time, but because they
constitute a most important chapter in Mr. Wallis's life, in
regard to which he has expressed the desire that any judgment
of his motives or his actions, should be made to rest upon these
very documents. No vindication is necessary, but the part which
Mr. Wallis bore in the events of 1860-61, in Maryland, was too
conspicuous and too honorable, to permit, in the judgment of his
friends, this important chapter of his life to be passed over in
silence. For the same reason the Letter to the Hon. John Sher-
man, is included in the volume, the contents of which must be
regarded as partly biographical, if not auto-biographical. Many
of the papers contained in the second volume have heretofore
only been accessible in their scattered and official form, as part
of the Journal and Proceedings of the General Assembly of
Maryland in 1861.

The third and fourth volumes contain Mr. Wallis's two published
books on Spain, for many years almost, if not quite, out of print.
The first, entitled Glimpses of Spain ; or Notes of an unfinished
Tour in 1847, was published by Messrs. Harper & Brothers,
New York, in 1849, and has since been reprinted by them. The
other on Spain : Her Institutions, Politics and Public Men : A
Sketch, was published by Messrs. Ticknor, Reed & Fields, Boston,
1853. The copyright in both books has long since expired, and
their republication in the present memorial edition is in response
to a very generally expressed desire on the part of Mr. Wallis's
friends to possess them in this form.

Amid all the exactions of a busy professional life, Mr. Wallis
was a frequent contributor to the daily press, and his unsigned
articles on the current topics of the day were often recognized as
his, from the terseness and pungency of expression, the wit some-

viii INTRODUCTION.

times playful and sometimes caustic, and the wealth and appo-
siteness of illustration and argument which were the familiar
ear-marks of his style. No attempt has been made to include
in the present collection, any of these writings of an ephemeral
character, from the impossibility, as it seemed to the Committee,
of reproducing the personal and local coloring and atmosphere,
which gave them at the time, their special interest and effect.
They are only alluded to here, in order that the present collection
may not be supposed to furnish the full measure of Mr. Wallis's
remarkable intellectual activity and fertility. There can be no
doubt that his contributions to literature of a durable and perma-
nent character, would have been much more extensive, had not
the demands of his profession so fully occupied his time, and
taxed so severely a physical strength and constitution which were
never robust.

BIOGRAPHICAL.

To the foregoing statement of the origin and scope of this
Memorial Publication of Mr. Wallis's writings, it is deemed proper
to append a brief sketch of his career, with some few facts relating
to his parentage and family and to the place which he held in the
State and city where he was born, and lived and died.

Severn Teackle Wallis was born in the city of Baltimore, on
the 8th of September, 1816, being the second son of Philip Wallis
and Elizabeth Custis Teackle, his wife, daughter of Severn Teackle
of Talbot county, Maryland, after whom he was named. Both of
Mr. Wallis's parents came of families long-settled upon the Eastern
Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. His grandfather, Severn Teackle,
married February 23d, 1786, Lucretia Edmondson, daughter of
Pollard Edmondson of Talbot county. The Edmondsons were
descended from John Edmondson, one of the very early Quaker
settlers in Maryland, the personal friend and correspondent of

INTRODUCTION. ix

John Fox, the Founder of the Society. Fox, in his Journal
(Part second, London, 1709) mentions two visits which he paid
to John Edmondson, at his hospitable home on Tredhaven Creek
near Easton, on the 18th of July and 3d of August, 1672. John
Edmondson was the second Quaker elected to the Colonial Legis-
lature of Maryland. Pollard Edmondson, by whose time, how-
ever, the family had become Episcopalians, was also a member of
the Colonial Legislature, and a delegate from Talbot county to
the Convention of 1776, which framed the first Constitution of
the State of Maryland. He was afterwards a member of the
State Legislature under that Constitution.

Philip Wallis, the father of Severn Teackle Wallis, was the son
and only child of Samuel Wallis of Kent county, where the family
was settled in the early part of the 18th century. Inheriting a
considerable landed estate in Kent and Queen Anne counties,
from his father, young Philip Wallis, after leaving Washington
College, Kent County, Maryland, studied law in the office of the
Hon. James A. Bayard, in Wilmington, Delaware, but never
appears to have practised the profession. After his marriage to
Miss Teackle, and the birth of his eldest son, Philip, he removed
in 1816 from Easton to Baltimore, where all his other children,
four sons and three daughters, were born, and where he lived in
a house on North Charles street nearly opposite the Cathedral and
the residence of the Archbishop, until he finally removed in 1837
to Mississippi, where he owned a plantation near Yazoo city. He
is represented to have been a man of taste and cultivation, and
appears to have encouraged the early bent of his son Teackle,
towards literature, especially poetry and the classics. He died
October 23d, 1844, being killed by the explosion of the boiler of
a steamboat on the Ohio river.

On the maternal side, Mr. Wallis was descended from the
Reverend Thomas Teackle, a native of Gloucestershire, England,
who settled in Accomack county, Virginia, in 1652. He was the
son of a Royalist, who was killed in the service of King Charles I,
and was the first clergyman of the Established Church of Eng-
land settled on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. He received
grants of land in 1652 and 1668, and his parish at one time

X INTRODUCTION.

included the whole of Accomack and Northampton counties.
His estate, "Craddock," upon which he lived, and where he
died and was buried, January 26th, 1695, still retains the name
he gave it.

Mr. Wallis's maternal grandfather, Severn Teackle, for whom
he was named, was an officer in the Revolutionary army, a
lieutenant in 1776 in the 9th Virginia Regiment "on Conti-
nental Establishment," a captain in the same regiment in 1779,
afterwards transferred to the 5th Regiment, Virginia Line. Cap-
tain Teackle was taken prisoner either at Brandy wine or German-
town, in which latter engagement his regiment was conspicuous for
its gallantry, losing nearly half of its number in killed and wounded.
In a memorandum appended by Mr. Wallis, apparently in 1893,
to a copy of the "Genealogical Record (MS.) of the Teackle and
Edmondson Families" in his possession, he says: "I have not
analyzed the record so as to notice whether there were any inter-
marriages with the Severn family. There was a young gentleman
of that name, a lieutenant in the same regiment with my grand-
father." The records of the Virginia Land Office show a grant of
land in Northampton county to John Severn, on October 8th, 1644,
and the intimacy between the Severn family and the descendants
of the Reverend Thomas Teackle, appears from the frequency
of the use of Severn as a baptismal name in all the families of
the Teackle connection, the Upshurs, Eyres, Bowdoins, Parkers
and others.

Of a large family consisting, as already mentioned, of five sons
and three daughters, Mr. Wallis was for many years prior to his
death the sole survivor, with the exception of one brother, who is
still living, Mr. John S. Wallis, formerly of New Orleans, but
now a resident of Baltimore. Mr. Wallis's father died, as stated,
in 1844, his mother in 1852. Of the sons, only the eldest, Philip,
and the youngest, John S., ever married. The three daughters
died unmarried ; the eldest, Miss Elizabeth Custis Wallis, lived
with her brother in Baltimore for some years and until her death
in 1867.

Mr. Wallis's own life, with the exception of several visits
abroad and the period of his enforced absence while a prisoner

INTRODUCTION. xi

during the civil war, was passed mainly in the State of Maryland
and the city of Baltimore. There he received both his academic
and his professional education ; there he made his home and did
his life's work. After receiving elementary instruction at a pri-
vate school, he was entered as a student at St. Mary's College, an
institution which was founded in Baltimore in the latter part of
the 18th century by members of the Society of St. Sulpice in
Paris, who found in this country a refuge from the storms of the
French Revolution. It was raised to the rank of a university by
Act of the Legislature of Maryland in 1805, and for many years
enjoyed a high reputation as a collegiate institution in the United
States, Canada, and the neighboring States of Mexico and South
America, from all of which it drew a large number of pupils. It
exists to-day only as a Seminary for the education and training
of young men for the Catholic priesthood, according to the original
purpose and design of the Sulpitian Society. At St. Mary's,
young Wallis was graduated Bachelor of Arts at the age of six-
teen, and two years later was admitted Master of Arts, and in
1841 his Alma Mater conferred upon him the honorary degree of
Doctor of Laws.

In 1832, immediately after leaving college, Mr. Wallis began
the study of the law in Baltimore, in the office of the celebrated
William Wirt, the distinguished orator and jurist, who, from 1817
to 1829, under two Presidents and three administrations, held the
office of Attorney General of the United States. Upon the death
of Mr. Wirt in 1834, Mr. Wallis continued his studies in the
office of Mr. John Glenn, a leading and successful lawyer, who,
upon his retirement from the bar many years later, was appointed
Judge of the United States District Court. In September, 1837,
at the age of twenty-one, Mr. Wallis was admitted to the bar.

While at St. Mary's he had evinced great fondness for and
acquired considerable proficiency in the study of the Spanish
language and literature, in which pursuit he derived both encour-
agement and assistance from a highly accomplished Spanish
scholar and gentleman, Don Jose* Antonio Pizarro, Spanish Vice-
Consul at Baltimore, and for many years a professor at St. Mary's,
with whom Mr. Wallis kept up a warm friendship and inti-

xii INTRODUCTION.

macy, which lasted until Mr. Pizarro's death at a very advanced
age. The old gentleman in his youth had been an officer in the
Spanish army during the French invasion (1810-1812), and was
wounded at the siege of Cadiz. In recognition of his attainments,
in 1844, Mr. Wallis had the honor of being elected a correspond-
ing member of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid. This
was not, however, the only distinction his reputation as a scholar
won for him abroad. In 1846 he was made a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries at Copenhagen. In 1847,
being in somewhat delicate health, which his friends thought
would be benefited by a sea-voyage, he was persuaded to go
abroad, and for the first time then visited Spain. The fruits of
his keen observation and thorough appreciation of what he saw
upon this visit, were embodied upon his return in a modest volume
bearing the title of Glimpses of Spain ; or, Notes of an Unfinished
Tour, published by Harper & Brothers in 1849.

The publication of this book, together with Mr. Wallis's already
high reputation as a lawyer, doubtless contributed to his selection
by the Government at Washington, for an important professional
mission. In 1849 he revisited Spain, commissioned by the Secre-
tary of the Interior to examine and report upon the title to public
lands in Florida, as affected by Spanish grants made during the
pendency of negotiations with this country in 1819. Thus accred-
ited to the Spanish authorities in an official way, and with the
familiarity with the country and the people already acquired during
his previous visit, Mr. Wallis enjoyed exceptional opportunities
for obtaining information not always accessible to the ordinary
tourist. His second book on Spain, published upon his return,
entitled Spain; Her Institutions, Polities and Public Men, although
but " a sketch," as he calls it, contained in a small compass the best
account of Spanish politics at that time, and of the then existing
constitution of the monarchy, within the reach of English readers.

Mr. Wallis revisited Europe in 1856 and again in 1884, but
after his return in 1849, his life for a time passed uneventfully,
being devoted almost exclusively to the practice of the law, with
occasional excursions into the fields of politics and of literature.
His practice was a large and growing one, and as lucrative as

INTRODUCTION. xiii

with his very moderate ideas upon the subject of professional
fees and compensation, he permitted it to be. He enjoyed the
reputation of being a safe and wise counsellor and adviser, as
well as that of being one of the most eloquent and persuasive
advocates at the Maryland bar. His appearances were frequent
at the bar of the Court of Appeals of the State and of the
Supreme Court of the United States, in cases of importance.
From being one of the favorite juniors and associates of the great
leaders of the bar — Reverdy Johnson, John Nelson and others, he
had won his own way to a place in the front rank of leadership.

Mr. Wallis's attitude in political matters, and his relation to
party politics were always somewhat peculiar. He was by nature
and temperament an ardent partisan. He espoused, with the
same fervor that he did the cause of a client, the political cause
and principles which commended themselves most strongly to
the approval of his intellect and his conscience. He never sur-
rendered, however, to any claims of partisanship, or, upon any
plea of party discipline or expediency, his own personal inde-
pendence and reserved right of individual freedom of action.
His own interests or ambition had nothing to do with shaping
his political convictions. He spoke and wrote and acted in
politics, as he personally thought and felt that truth and justice
required. Party success he regarded simply as a means to an
end, that end being with him always the triumph of the right
as he saw it and believed in it. Consequently, with all the
warmth and intensity of his partisanship, Mr. Wallis was never
regarded as a good " party man " in the usual acceptation of the
term. He did not hesitate to withdraw from the support of a
party organization with which he had previously co-operated,
when he believed that the organization itself had departed from
the principles which had originally won his allegiance. In his
younger days he was an enthusiastic Whig. When the Whig
Party began to disintegrate, one faction siding with the newly-
formed American or " Know-Nothing" organization, and another
drifting into the ranks of the " Free-Soilers," Mr. Wallis did not
hesitate to identify himself with the Democratic Party. In that
political faith and fellowship he continued, while reserving to

xiv INTRODUCTION.

himself and exercising freely the same independence of thought
and action which had characterized his whole previous political
career. In 1857, he was offered the position of United States
District Attorney by President Buchanan, but for personal rea-
sons, declined it. He never sought political preferment, and
never held political office except when its acceptance involved
personal risk and suffering, and proved the passport to a prison.

In 1858, Mr. Wallis wrote the Reform Address to the citizens
of Baltimore, which, appearing over his signature and that of a
few other gentlemen, resulted in the Reform movement which
culminated in the passage of the Election and Police Bills
by the Legislature of 1860, and the election, in October of that
year, of a Reform Mayor and City Council for the city of Balti-
more. The constitutionality of the new Police Law being con-
tested in the courts, Mr. Wallis who had taken an active part
in drafting the bill, was one of the counsel who appeared for the
newly constituted Board of Police Commissioners, and successfully
argued their case before the Court of Appeals at Annapolis.

In 1861, the increasing estrangement between the North and
the South, following upon the incessant agitation of the Slavery
Question, and the election of President Lincoln, resulted in civil
war. At the outset of the Secession movement in the South, the
position of Maryland as a Border State, and with a population
divided in its sympathies, was felt to be most critical. Mr.
Wallis's position and actions during that eventful and perilous
time, are best illustrated by his own speeches and writings.
Without enlarging upon the facts of history, further than to
explain those incidents in Mr. Wallis's personal experience, which
would necessarily find a place in any sketch, however meagre,
of his life, it is sufficient to say that he fully shared that feeling
of personal sympathy with the South which was entertained
by a large proportion, to say the least, of the cultivated and
educated people of the State. This would seem to have been
the natural consequence, to seek no farther for reasons, of Mr.
Wallis's ancestry, education and personal tastes and associations.
He felt as gentlemen of his class and position very generally felt
in Maryland. Yet this feeling of sympathy with the people of his

INTRODUCTION. xv

own blood and section was not stronger than his attachment to the
Union of the States, as formed and contemplated by the Federal
Constitution. This attachment on Mr. Wallis's part was strong
and sincere, and he cherished the hope until hope was no longer
possible, that a way might be found to stay the tide of popular
passion, both North and South, and to avert the horrible calamity
of a disrupted Union and of an internecine war. On February
1st, 1861, a town-meeting was held in the hall of the Maryland
Institute in Baltimore, which was addressed by Mr. Wallis, among
others, on the condition of affairs, the position of the State of
Maryland and the duty of her people. That address speaks his
sentiments at the time.

The actual outbreak of civil war, the attack upon Fort Sumter,
the President's proclamation calling for volunteers for the defence
of the Capital, the hurried mustering of troops at the North, and
their onward march to Washington in response to the President's
call, the lamentable collision in the streets of Baltimore, on the
19th of April, 1861, between a Massachusetts regiment and an
excited body of citizens who sought to obstruct its passage
through the city, followed in quick succession. On Sunday,
the 21st of April, Mr. Wallis was one of a committee of citizens,
who with the Mayor, had an interview in Washington with Presi-
dent Lincoln, his cabinet and General Winfield Scott, and obtained
an order from the President temporarily suspending the passage
of troops through Baltimore, so as to avoid further bloodshed, in
the then frenzied state of the public mind.

On April 24th, a special election was held in Baltimore for
delegates to represent the city in the State Legislature, which, in
consequence of the critical condition of affairs, was called by the
Governor to meet in extra session in the city of Frederick on
April 26th. The special election was rendered necessary by the
unseating of the entire city delegation, at the previous regular
session, in consequence of gross fraud and violence held to have
characterized their election on November 2d, 1859. Frederick
was designated as the place of meeting in consequence of the State
capital, Annapolis, being in military possession of the Federal
troops. On the day of election there was but one ticket nominated

xvi INTRODUCTION.

and voted for, Mr. Wallis being one of the delegates elected.
Upon the assembling of the Legislature, he was made chairman
of the House Committee on Federal Relations ; and on the 29th
of April, three days after the Legislature met, the House of Dele-
gates, by a vote of 53 to 12, approved a report and resolutions
from the committee, drafted by Mr. Wallis, declaring that the
General Assembly of the State of Maryland had no power to pass
an ordinance of secession. On the 2d day of May the Committee
on Federal Relations presented a further report and resolutions,
also drawn by Mr. Wallis, for the appointment of Commissioners
to visit Washington and confer with the President in regard to
reopening and restoring communication between Baltimore and
the North, which had been interrupted since the 19th of April.
The report and resolutions were approved by both Houses of the
Legislature. On the 10th of May the same committee submitted
a report and resolutions, also prepared by Mr. Wallis, reviewing
the actual condition of affairs, and the relation of the State of
Maryland to the Federal Government, and declaring that it was
inexpedient to call a Sovereign Convention of the people of the
State to consider the question of secession. The report and reso-
lutions were adopted, and on the 14th the Legislature adjourned
to meet again at Frederick on the 4th of June.

On the day that the Legislature adjourned, Mr. Ross Winans,
one of the delegates from Baltimore, was arrested while re-
turning from Frederick to his home, without legal warrant, by
a military force, acting under orders from Major-General B. F.
Butler, and taken to Fort McHenry, whence he was afterwards
transferred to Fortress Monroe. Other military arrests followed
rapidly. On the 27th of June, while the Legislature was again
in session, having reassembled at Frederick, pursuant to adjourn-
ment, the Marshal of Police of Baltimore, was arrested at his
home, at three o'clock in the morning, by a military force,
and confined in Fort McHenry. On the 1st of July, the arrest
of the entire Board of Police Commissioners of Baltimore city
followed, the Commissioners being apprehended at their respective
homes, between the hours of three and five in the morning, and con-
veyed under guard to the fort. The spirited memorial addressed

INTRODUCTION. xvii

by the Commissioners to the Senate and House of Representatives
of the United States, upon the subject of their arbitrary arrest
and imprisonment was from the pen of Mr. Wallis. On the 5th
of August, both Houses of the Legislature of Maryland adopted
a report and resolutions submitted by a joint committee of which
Mr. Wallis was chairman upon the same subject. To a copy of
this report, among Mr. Wallis's papers, the following note in his
handwriting is appended. " If my participation," is the lan-
guage of the note, " in the events of these times should be the
subject, hereafter, of remembrance or consideration, I am willing
that my reputation for personal and political rectitude and for
fidelity to the institutions of my State and the Union, shall
depend upon the judgment which may be passed on this Report."
—(signed) " S. T. Wallis, May 24th, 1863."

On the night of the 12th of September, 1861, Mr. Wallis was
arrested at his dwelling in St. Paul street, Baltimore, by order
of Major-General John A. Dix, commanding at Fort McHenry.
The order addressed to the Provost Marshal of Baltimore, directed
the " arrest without an hour's delay " of the Mayor of the city,
George William Brown, Esq., the members of the Legislature
from Baltimore city, and of several other persons therein named.
Other arrests took place the same night in pursuance of direct
orders from Washington, including that of the Hon. Henry May,
a member of Congress at the time, from Maryland. The prisoners
were taken under guard to Fort McHenry, and on the afternoon
of the following day, conveyed by boat to Fortress Monroe, and
about two weeks later transported by sea to Fort Lafayette, in
New York Harbor. In November, they were again removed to
Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, where they remained without
trial until the latter part of November, 1862, when Mr. Wallis
and thirteen others, all but one of whom were from Maryland, and
all of whom had been prisoners for a period varying from fourteen
to seventeen months, were unconditionally released by order of
the Secretary of War, and allowed to return to their homes.

Naturally of a delicate constitution, and frequently an invalid,
Mr. Wallis suffered keenly from the physical privations incident
to his imprisonment. The cold and bleak climate of the New
iii

xviii INTRODUCTION.

England coast in winter, aggravated constitutional ailments to
which he had long been subject, and he suffered greatly from the
want of comforts to which he had been accustomed, and which
to a valetudinarian had become a necessity. At Fortress Monroe,
he was confined for fourteen days, with a number of others, in one
of the casemates of the Fort, closely guarded and under lock and
key. At Fort Warren, where he spent more than twelve months
of his captivity, he was assigned with others to a single room in
the officers' quarters of the Fort, but with larger liberty and
opportunity for exercise. Other alleviations of strict prison life,
which were unknown at Fortress Monroe or Fort Lafayette, were
here permitted. Prisoners were allowed to receive books and
papers, to make such additions, as their means permitted, to the
ordinary army rations furnished by the government, and to cor-
respond with their friends, subject to the restriction that all letters
sent or received were required to be previously read by an officer
assigned to that duty. But beyond any sense of physical re-
straint or hardships, Mr. Wallis's spirit constantly chafed under
what he regarded as the intolerable wrong and injustice of his
arbitrary arrest and incarceration. His views upon this subject
find full expression in the letter which shortly after his release,
he addressed to the Hon. John Sherman, in reply to some obser-
vations made by the latter in a speech in the United States
Senate, in reference to the Maryland arrests.

Mr. Wallis bore himself during the long months of his con-
finement, with unfailing dignity and fortitude. His common-place
book, in which he was in the habit of setting down for future
reference things new or interesting which he had noted in his
daily reading, bears witness to his power of mental abstraction,
and to the relief which he found in literature from the small
annoyances as well as graver burdens of his prison-life. By the
charm of his conversation, bright and entertaining as if prison
walls had no existence, he helped to beguile the tedium of a con-
finement which weighed heavily upon his companions as well as
upon himself. By numberless acts of kindness and of charity,
he contributed to alleviate the lot of others less fortunate and
well-provided for than himself. At times the number of prisoners

INTRODUCTION. xix

in Fort Warren, including those who were captured in battle,
amounted to many hundreds, of whom the greater number brought
nothing with them but the clothes they wore when they were
captured.

After his release from Fort Warren, in November, 1862, Mr.
Wallis returned to Baltimore and resumed the thread of his inter-
rupted professional life. The years which followed were perhaps
those of his greatest professional success. During these years
also, some of his best literary work was accomplished, and his
most important public services rendered, while still remaining in
private station. After the State Constitution of 1867 had removed
all the barriers to political preferment, which had been raised
during the war, and had opened the way for the return to power
of men of Mr. Wallis's opinions, there was a time when he un-
doubtedly could have held any office, in the gift of his fellow-
citizens of Baltimore or Maryland, if his ambition and tastes had
led him in that direction. On, at least, two occasions after the
administration of the municipal government of Baltimore had
passed into the hands of the Democratic party, he was offered the
position of chief law officer of the city. He was also urged to
allow the use of his name as a candidate for Congress. These,
and other offers, he declined, partly because official life really had
no temptations for him, and partly because of his uncertain and
gradually failing health. At the same time his interest in public
affairs continued without abatement. He labored constantly and
earnestly, with voice and pen, to bring others, especially young
men, to that high standard of unselfish and independent action in
political matters, which he felt was becoming more and more
necessary and more rare, alike in party management and in public
administration. Every movement which seemed to carry with it
the hope and promise of political Reform, appealed to his sympa-
thy and was sure of his active support. Thus, he was prominently
identified, from the outset, both with the Civil Service Reform
Association of Maryland and the Reform League of Baltimore
city, of which latter organization he continued to be the President
until his death. Only once did he suffer his reluctance to be a
candidate for office to be overcome. This was in 1875 when, being

xx INTRODUCTION.

at the time ill in New York city and unable to take any active
part in the canvass, he accepted the nomination for Attorney
General of the State upon a ticket which was supported by Re-
publicans and Independent Democrats. The ticket was defeated,
but the fairness of the election and of the return made of the
votes cast being called in question, Mr. Wallis instituted legal
proceedings with a view to having the matter judicially inquired
into, but the Court of Appeals held that it was without jurisdic-
tion, and nothing was done in the premises. Mr. Wallis's defeat
could hardly, under the circumstances, be considered as a test of
his personal popularity, since many of his friends and admirers
disapproved of the coalition with the Republicans, and withheld
their support from him on that account.

Gradually, with advancing years, his health began to break.
He was compelled to curtail the labors for which his spirit was
always willing, but to which the flesh was no longer equal. The
intellectual fire was unabated, but his appearances on public
occasions, upon the political platform, and in court, became less
frequent. During the late winter and spring of 1894, he was
seldom able to leave his house. Finally, on the llth of April of
1894, less from the inroads of disease than from the gradual
weakening and exhaustion of the vital forces, he quietly and
painlessly passed away, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.
His body, after funeral services in St. Paul's Church, Baltimore,
was deposited in his own lot in Green mount Cemetery, where
also are buried his mother, two brothers who died in infancy,
three sisters, and his venerable friend, Mr. Pizarro.

Although remarkable for the strength and tenderness of his
personal attachments, Mr. Wallis never married. He was most
domestic in his tastes and habits. He loved his home, his books
and the society of his friends, whom he delighted to have about
him, and who found him at all times the most charming of hosts
and companions. The grief of his friends at his death was shared
by the community at large. Certainly no instance can be recalled
of any one not in high public station whose death has called forth
so many tributes of respect and affection from the people of Mary-
land. The various public bodies and institutions with which he

INTRODUCTION. xxi

had been identified while living, — the Trustees of the Peabody
Institute, and the Maryland Historical Society, of both of which
bodies he was President ; the Regents of the University of Mary-
land, of which he was Provost, and others, — held meetings and
took appropriate proceedings to testify to their sense of the loss
which they, in common with the whole community, had sustained.
Among these tributes, for which it would be impossible to afford
space here, there are two, however, which may be thought to
furnish an appropriate and fitting conclusion to this memorial
sketch. One is the Minute of the Bench and Bar of Maryland,
originally adopted at a Bar meeting in Baltimore, held immedi-
ately after Mr. Wallis's death, and subsequently ordered to be
recorded among the proceedings of the Supreme Bench of that
city, together with the remarks of the late Chief Judge Robinson,
of the Court of Appeals of Maryland, on the occasion of the pre-
sentation of the same Minute to that Court at Annapolis.

The other tribute, which is of a more personal character, but
none the less valuable and interesting on that account, is from
the pen of Mr. Wallis's friend and physician, Dr. Samuel C.
Chew, who attended him in his last illness and was with him
when he died. It appears in the proceedings of the Trustees of
the Peabody Institute on the occasion of Mr. Wallis's death.

The following is the "Memorial Minute" of the Bench and
Bar as it appears in the 77th volume of the Reports of the Court
of Appeals of Maryland :

"The death of Severn Teackle Wallis is an event which arrests the
attention of every citizen of Maryland, and is recognized as a great public
bereavement from one end of the Commonwealth to the other. Everywhere
and by everybody it is felt that Maryland has lost her foremost citizen.

" For us who were his professional brethren, who knew, and, therefore,
admired and honored him, it would suffice to add to the bare mention of
his death, 'no praise can be equal to so great a name,' but, for the honor of
the profession, it is fitting that we record our estimate of him as a lawyer
and a man.

"He has closed, at the ripe age of seventy- seven, a professional career
which, extending over more than half a century, is, in many respects, with-

xxii INTRODUCTION.

out an example or a parallel in the annals of our Bar. Great men and
lawyers the Maryland Bar has furnished heretofore, who have risen to the
highest judicial positions in the land, and filled with honor the office of
Attorney-General of the United States. Without obtaining any of these
great rewards and dignities of the profession, Mr. Wallis nevertheless
reached a height of professional eminence which entitles him to rank
among the first and ablest of these distinguished men.

"But Mr. Wallis's especial greatness as a lawyer was that he was so
much more than a lawyer. To the accurate and varied learning of the
profession, he added the grace and culture of the scholar, and the charm of
an eloquence which made him one of the foremost and most persuasive
orators of our times. Above all, he brought to the practice of the pro-
fession, in all its relations, the loftiest standards of professional duty and
honor. The purity of his life, and nobility and dignity of his character,
his scorn of everything sordid, base or mean, the kindness of his heart, and
the grace and charm of his manner, added to the wealth and abundance of
his intellectual gifts and accomplishments, made him the finest type and
model of what a great lawyer can be. As such, this Bar will ever cherish
his memory, and the generous aspiration of future generations will find in
his life and fame a perpetual incentive to noble endeavor.

" Mr. Wallis recognized and illustrated in the highest degree the obliga-
tions which the profession owes to the public, as the guardian and defender
of its political rights, its civil and religious liberties. No better or more
public-spirited citizen, no purer or more unselfish patriot ever lived in this
community. In the darkest hour of civil strife, when the law was silent in
the midst of the din of arms, he showed a courage and constancy as great
as was ever displayed on the field of battle.

" In the liberality of his views and generosity of his heart, he strove to
leave no duty, public or private, unfulfilled, and acknowledged no limit to
his obligations except the lack of opportunity or want of physical strength.
The universal sorrow with which the announcement of his death, although
not unexpected, has been received, attests the appreciation by men of all
classes, creeds and parties, of the nobility and usefulness of his life and their
sense of the public loss occasioned by his death.

"Resolved, That in the death of SEVERN TEACKLE WALLIS the Bar of
Maryland has lost its brightest ornament, his friends a cherished and
revered companion, and the State its noblest citizen."

Chief Judge Robinson, on behalf of the Court of Appeals,
responded as follows :

" Few men have died in Maryland whose death has been so universally
and so sincerely lamented as that of Mr. Wallis. His brethren of the Bar
and the Judges of the several Courts, the daily witnesses of his professional

INTRODUCTION. xxiii

life, and the press throughout the State, have all united in touching and
affectionate tributes to his memory. Few men, if any, have ever better
deserved such tributes. This spontaneous and reverent homage to his
attainments and character as a lawyer, to his rare intellectual gifts and
accomplishments, and to the purity of his private and public life, is the
best evidence of the high place he held in the hearts of all who knew him.
For more than a half century he has been a conspicuous member of this
Court, and was of counsel in many of the most important cases before it.
Here was the scene of many of his best efforts and highest achievements ;
and, though we cannot hope to add anything to what has been already so
well and better said by others, yet it is eminently proper that we should
give expression to our deep sense of the loss we have suffered, and mingle
our own personal sorrow with the universal sorrow which his death has
occasioned. Long before the oldest member here was even admitted to the
Bar, he was by general consent recognized as one of its ablest leaders ; and
this, too, at a time when to win such a distinction "was to walk in the
footsteps" and to be measured by the genius of that brilliant array of
lawyers who have shed an unfading lustre and renown upon the Bar of
Maryland. With such men as these he stood in the foremost rank, and
throughout his long and successful career, he has ever been distinguished,
not only for his eminent abilities as a lawyer, but for all those noble and
knightly qualities which elevate the profession and make it worthy of one's
best faculties and highest aspiration. He was not only a well-read and
thoroughly trained lawyer, but he was also an accomplished Belles Lettres
scholar. The law, it has been said, is a jealous mistress, and claims an
undivided worship from those who aspire to its highest honors. To this
rule, however, Mr. Wallis was a notable exception. He was fond of liter-
ary pursuits, and his mind was enriched with the fruits of a wide and
liberal culture. And it is not too much to say that his published addresses
and essays, for nobility of thought, elegance of expression and purity of
style, will compare favorably with the best productions of ancient or
modern time.

" This is not the time, however, or the occasion for a eulogy on his life
and character. Less, however, we felt could not be said. His work is
ended — nobly, worthily ended. His death has created a void difficult to
measure, and more difficult to fill. And though he has passed away from
us forever, the fruits of his work will still live, and the example of his life
will be an inspiration to those who shall come after him, so long as integrity
of life and conduct, and courageous fidelity to duty, are esteemed as virtues
among men.

"The 'Memorial Minute' of the Bench and Bar, together with these pro-
ceedings, will be placed on the records of this Court."

xxiv INTRODUCTION.

At a special meeting, Monday, April 16, 1894, of the Board
of Trustees of the Peabody Institute, called on the occasion of
Mr. Wallis's death, Dr. Samuel C. Chew spoke as follows :

" Mr. President: — I shall not attempt any eulogy of our departed colleague
and friend, for here and elsewhere the powers of language have been used
to their uttermost to portray the nobility of his character and the graces and
culture of his heart and mind. There are those present whose intellects
have been trained largely in the same lines of study and thought in which
his own attained its splendid development, and it has been their duty and
pleasure to make record of what Severn Teackle Wallis was as a lawyer, a
statesman and a true hearted patriot in the noblest sense of that word.

" These sides of his character and personality are known to many, but
there is another side. I have thought sometimes that the relations between
a patient and his physician may give the key to certain qualities of that
patient's mental and spiritual nature which are not so clearly displayed to
others. And so, without, 1 trust, violating the seal and the sacredness of
those relations, I feel it right to say something of the qualities which were
wrought in Mr. Wallis by all that he underwent through ' that long disease
his life' — qualities which as one of the mysteries that human life is involved
in, may become more and more increased and refined, until they attain, here
or hereafter, to that perfectness which cometh through suffering.

" And, first, let me say that in those years during which I had what I
account, and always shall account, the privilege and the benediction of
ministering to him, I never heard from him one word of repining against
that fate which had given him infirmity and disease as his portion in life.
Kather did the effort to strive against their depressing influences bring an
increase of his spiritual and mental powers, so that, like those of old, 'out
of weakness he was made strong.' His place was with them

" ' Who doomed to go in company with pain,
Turn their necessity to glorious gain.
In face of it can exercise a power
Which is our human nature's highest dower ;
Controls it and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
Of its bad influence, and its good receives.'

" But he was much more than patient in his suffering. After giving the
daily account of his troubles, and the answers to such questions as were
necessary for his physician's guidance, he would become always, as those
who saw him often will unite with me in testifying, as bright and buoyant
as though pain had never touched him. Out of his own deep wisdom, out
of the abundance of his poetic imagination, out of the exuberance of his
wit and humor, and out of the copious literatures, English, Spanish, French

INTRODUCTION. xxv

and Latin, with which his mind was saturated, he would bring forth such
treasures, new and old, as made his conversation the most delightful of
intellectual enjoyments.

"His was

" ' The cheerful heart, which all the muses love ;
The soaring spirit, which is their prime delight.'

" There are many memories crowded in my mind, which, if time allowed,
I might evoke to show the tenor of his thoughts, especially during the last
part of his life. But a few must suffice.

" Some weeks ago, as I was sitting by his bedside, the sunshine streaming
through his chamber window, he said to me: 'How beautiful this world is I'
and then repeated the lines :

" ' For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast oue longing, lingering look behind.'

" And then, as though his ear so attuned to the melody of verse, took a
delight in the beautiful alliteration, or, perhaps, as looking forward him-
self, he repeated, dwelling on the words,

" ' One longing, lingering look behind.'

"We who are here all know his deep and almost passionate love of
flowers, and how, through the devotion of his friends, he was constantly
surrounded by them, his room being often a very bower of roses. On
Easter Day, three weeks ago, when I made my usual visit to him, I took
him, at the request of one of his friends, some Easter lilies, and, though
flowers in abundance were all about his room, these were the only lilies he
had then received. A bright smile came over his face as he took them,
uttering the lovely words :

" 'Manibus date lilia plenis.'

"For many years Mr. Wallis was accustomed to spend some hours of
every day with Mr. Pizarro, a Spanish gentleman of intelligence and culti-
vation, who for a long time filled the position of Spanish Consul in this
city, and from the opportunities thus afforded he was enabled to add to his
knowledge of Spanish literature that perfect facility in speaking the lan-
guage which, as has been said, would have caused any Spaniard to believe
that the purest Castilian was his native tongue.

"Through Mr. Pizarro, too, he became imbued with a love of the Vulgate
translation of the Bible, and often the melodious and sonorous lines of this
version of the Psalms fell from his lips.

xxvi INTRODUCTION.

" As the end of his life drew near, he seemed to live more in contempla-
tion of the unseen.

"There is an instinctive desire to know how a man of such high intel-
lectual endowments regarded the issues of eternity when brought face to
face with them.

" To such a question his own vigorous and beautiful lines give a partial
answer, and show the tenor of his thoughts :

'"I would not that the dreams of old

Should veil again the weakened mind,
Nor mine their iaith who idly hold

That to be wise we need be blind ;
But when I see how darkly lie

The plainest things before mine eyes,
That with each turn of reason's wheel

Falsehood and truth both upward go,
I can but think that what I feel

Is best and most of what I know ;
And that where'er our tents are cast,

Each hath an angel by his side,
From the first life-sigh to the last

His guardian, champion, friend and guide.'

" But I feel that here I must speak with guarded lips, for there are some
utterances too sacred to be imparted or shared. And yet it can be no viola-
tion of rightful reserve to say that almost his latest words, faintly audible
but still distinct, as the shadows closed around him, words which we may
regard as the ' extremum munus morientis,' were these, ' I am at peace.'

" He loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Perfect truthfulness and
stainless integrity, and charity of hand and heart, boundless and overflow-
ing to all, these were the traits which made up his character, and they are
the traits of the servants of God.

" 'Pretiosa in conspectu Domini mors sanctorum Ejus.' "

ADDRESSES.

LEISURE;

ITS MORAL AND POLITICAL ECONOMY.

LEISURE.

WE have all read, many times, and there are few of us
who have not dropped a tear, now and then, over
that wonderful and painfully suggestive poem, " The Song
of the Shirt." A brother-humorist of Hood's, whose praise
is almost fame, has said of it, with truthful sympathy, that,
" it may surely rank as a great act of charity to the world."
You remember, of course, its wild, and touching burden —

" Work, work, work !
From weary chime to chime ;
Work, work, work !
As prisoners work for crime."

And yet, how few there are who pause to fathom all the
depths of the story which it tells ! Our hearts are wrung,
and our eyes fill, as we gaze upon the single picture which
it paints, of toil and hopeless and forsaken wretchedness ; and
we forget that the woman who

"Sits in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread — "

is only the melancholy extreme, and unhappy but legitimate
consummation, of a social and political philosophy which
throws its universal shadow over the most prosperous devel-

6 LEISURE.

opments of modern civilization. We lose sight, in our pity,
of the fact that " work, work, work ! " is the great moral
and maxim of the age in which we live — going home, it is
true, with cruellest severity, to the comfortless dwellings of
humble and ill-paid toil, but laying its iron hand, neverthe-
less, upon the lives and the destinies of almost all classes
of society. Is it not the theme of the books that men write
for all of us, and of the teachings that are vouchsafed to us,
for the practical guidance of life, at the domestic fireside,
from the professor's chair and the chambers of legislation?
There is no ditty of our childhood which rings a more familiar
jingle in our ears, than that which warned us, amid our play-
things, how

"Satan finds some mischief still

For idle hands to do!"

Can we not all remember the traditionary wisdom of " Poor
Richard's Almanac" — that precious volume of uninspired
proverbs — whence we learned in our maturer boyhood, that
money-getting was a secular religion — rather more important
than the other, if anything — and were taught, by a sort of
parody on the warnings of Scripture, that we should " work
while it is called to-day, for we know not how much we
may be hindered to-morrow ? " Have we not pored over our
treatises, more or less profound, and listened, more or less
profitably, to our lectures upon Political Economy, to the
edifying and elevating effect, that the great social end of man,
and the only true policy of nations, is to produce as much as
possible and consume as little — to get as much as we can for
what we sell and pay as little as possible for what we buy —
to starve our neighbor, in other words, and eat his substance

LEISURE. 7

ourselves ? Surely, after having thus ennobled selfishness into
a science, it is simply sentimentalism in us to grieve, with
gentle-hearted Hood,

"That bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!"

We should rather cry Glory to Adam Smith ! and lose sight
of the misery of mere men and women, in the progress and
wealth of the nations.

One of the most popular and striking writers of the day,
Mr. Carlyle — certainly a man of genius, though he has written
a great deal which might not seem so novel or profound, I
think, if it were done out of German into English — seems to
have established, as the basis of his moral and philosophical
system, that our purpose in this world is to do something; and
that provided we are always doing, and in earnest, it makes
no great matter what we do. The somewhat incongruous
deductions which he draws from this fundamental idea, he
calls the "Evangel," and sometimes the "Gospel, of Labor";
and it is this blessed message to humanity which, for the most
part, he goes about proclaiming. I wonder it should never
have occurred to so clever and acute a man, that such a
" Gospel," — if it means anything but words — is but a message
to our race of the primeval curse of the Old Dispensation,
unrelieved and unredeemed by any of the charities or cove-
nants of the New. I know no parallel to it, in point of
consolation, except the discourse of the ranting preacher to
the gipsy, in one of Hood's novels : — " Woman," cried he,
" behold, I bring you glad tidings ! You are an accursed
race ! " I do not marvel that in pursuing such a system to its

8 LEISURE.

legitimate conclusions, Mr. Carlyle should have blended in
one picture, as heroes, the Founder of Christianity and the
Prophet of Mecca.

But the economists and moral philosophers of our generation
have not the " Evangel of Labor " altogether to themselves.
The poets have been far too wise to allow the mere dealers in
prose to monopolize so much available capital ; and the most
of the songs that are sung to us, now, have a perpetual refrain
of " work, work, work " — very elevated and grand, and occa-
sionally unintelligible, of course, as sublime things ought to
be — but still " work ! " It has been ascertained, beyond a
doubt, as you are aware, that every human being has what is
called a " mission ; " and the result of the most profound and
recent poetical investigation seems to be, that our " mission "
is " work." There are shrewd suspicions afloat, it must be
admitted, that mankind received some hints, and not of a
congratulatory character, either, concerning this destiny of
theirs, as far back as the times of " the gardener Adam and
his wife " ; but still the poets of the day insist on singing it,
not merely as a truth, but as an attractive novelty. Mr.
Tennyson, for instance, is full of it. Addressing himself to
the world at large, he has no title more endearing than

" Men my brothers — men the workers ! "

Of course, all the Tennysonians — and they are the great
majority of bards — though they toil not, neither do they spin,
in their peculiar vocation, but steal from the laureate, out-
right— are yet fuller of the toilsome mission of humanity
than even their great prototype. Our own countryman, Mr.
Longfellow, from whose delightful genius we might expect

LEISURE. 9

something better and more original, has established for him-
self a perfect speciality in the regard of which I speak ; and
one would think, from the burden of his music, that the
destiny of mankind is chiefly to do two things — "to labor
and to wait," and " suffer and be strong " — a heroic destiny,
to be sure, and well adapted to versification, but nevertheless
not altogether refreshing in an experimental point of view.

While moralists and political economists thus combine to
teach, and poets to sing, the sanctity of work, it would be
quite unreasonable to expect that those who are called the
" practical men " of the day should lag behind. I dare say
you have all heard and read many discourses, in your time,
concerning the dignity and nobility of labor. I myself have
had the benefit of a great many ; but I confess that the feeling
which they have generally awakened, has been that of very
profound disgust. The most of us understand, I am sure,
from our own experience, the very unpleasant though indis-
pensable relation between the sweat of our brows and our
daily bread. Upon that point, we certainly need no prompt-
ing ; but to go beyond that — to collect a crowd of weary and
toil-worn men together, and talk to them about the elevation
and grandeur of the burden which weighs them daily to the
ground — " no blessed leisure for love or hope " — is to pass, in
my poor judgment, into the region of unmitigated cant and
twaddle. No man, I believe, who is chained by necessity,
along with the rest of the galley-slaves of this earth, to his
toiling oar, can acquire from his own experience, unless he be
strangely constituted, or from his observation of other people,
any very lofty idea of the dignity of labor in itself. Respect-
ing, for one, as far as respect can go, the manhood which
2

10 LEISURE.

treads the path of toil, however humble, to honorable inde-
pendence— admiring, with heartiest admiration, the vigor and
the constancy which hold men, through difficulty, sacrifice and
pain, unswervingly close to the duties and responsibilities of
social and domestic life — I still can but regard the absorbing
labor which makes the sum total of most men's existence, as
one vast pool of Lethe, into which high faculties and generous
feelings, joyous susceptibilities and graceful tastes, noble and
gentle aspirations and priceless hours, go down, and are
drowned out of hope and memory forever ! I make no exclu-
sion of any calling whatever, in this respect. I mean none.
One may be more intellectual than another. One may give
play to higher faculties than another. One may develop more
of the purer and better nature than another. But I mean to
say, that the tendency of any exclusive calling or profession
which a man pursues for his bread, or for money, after he has
bread enough — an occupation in which he merges himself and
his thoughts — which dawns on him with the morrow's day-
light, as it folded its raven wings above him, when he sank
to his needful rest — is a plague and a scourge to him — his
descended share of the hereditary blight of his race — bear it
with what resignation and cheerfulness he may. And when I
hear men peddling rhetoric about its dignity and its nobility,
I am lost in surprise that the patience of the world should
abide such infinite imposition. I wonder how people bear to
be taught, as philosophy — as the economy of individual and
national life — that their noblest earthly purpose and occupation
is to toil up a weary hill, from which, when they reach the
summit, they behold nothing but a descent, perhaps precipitous
and sudden, on the other side ! And yet there is small cause

LEISURE. 11

for wonder at such patience, when we look around and see
and feel that the doctrines, thus promulgated and applauded,
are the law which governs you, and me, and all of us ; and
that the whole mass of the society in which we live, and the
nation of which we are citizens, are moving onward to the
quickstep of that false and fatal music. Who that is well
thought of, or desires to be, can afford to pause in the mighty
onward movement of labor and, as we call it, progress ? Who
is allowed to stop ? A man who will not mount the hurrying
train, is left behind, in despised and despairing isolation. He
who has once mounted, let him grow ever so weary or be ever
so sated with travel and anxious for repose, finds no resting
point at which to leave it, and cannot leap from it without
peril of destruction. Onward, forward, like Mazeppa :

"So fast they fly — away — away —
That they can neither sigh nor pray."

Can this be life ? the life of men and nations ? the intended
orbit of a world which rolled into existence amid the songs
of the morning stars, and arched over whose advancing
pathway is the beauty of the bow of promise ? It cannot be.
We are living under a false philosophy, and are beguiled by
a false science and by specious but empty words. The theory
of our social progress, in its relation to individuals, is a mere
delusion. We have taken fever for high health, and intoxi-
cation for happiness. We are sacrificing ourselves to our
work. We are bartering life for the appliances of living.
"We are pulling down our houses," as has been said, ato build
our monuments/' We have begun, socially and nationally, to
feel the consequences. Can we not tear ourselves awhile,

12 LEISURE.

from this unresting idolatry of labor, and stand still to
consider its effect upon ourselves, the human creatures who
are the laborers ?

There is nothing stranger, in the multitude of human
inconsistencies and contrasts, than the difference between the
ideal of life which men form to themselves, and the reality
into which they are content to shape their actual existence
and its practical ends and aims. Every one who looks to
the future at all, sees before him — when he enters upon his
career, be it high or humble — some fancied haven, into
which he prays for favorable winds to carry him, and
where he is quite resolved, in advance, if luck serves him,
to drop his anchor and furl his sails, — ploughing the troubled
seas no more. It may be some reasonable competence of
fortune — some moderate and attainable gratification of ambi-
tion— some realization of a definite and cherished hope — but,
still, every man starts life with it, and there are few who
would not be more than satisfied to compromise with their
destiny, off-hand, and treat the laborious purposes of existence
as answered, could they lay their hands upon the prize at
once, without the dust and the toil, the rivalry and strife of
the race. Some restless and troubled spirits, of course, there
are, to whom the struggle of the arena is worth more than
the crown of the victor; but there are few who commence
life with such feelings. It is the strife itself, for the most
part, which kindles the hot blood. It is the continued
debauch, which creates the growing and insatiable thirst —
the excitement, which makes excitement itself its own reward.
Nor is it merely in laying out the map of our own lives,
that we fix upon some green and pleasant spot where we

LEISURE. 13

would sit down and enjoy the shade. Not a novel — not a
comedy — will win a reader or an audience twice, unless it
gathers, at the end, all the good people with whose perplexi-
ties it has delighted us, under those vines and fig trees which
grow to such luxuriance nowhere, as in the sunshine of fiction
or the glow of the foot-lights. And, recollecting this, how
odd it is, that when men come to work out, with their own
hands, the problem of their destiny, there should be so few
before whom the goal of their youth's aspirations and hopes
does not recede, as the horizon — so few, who are willing to
say to themselves, " We have travelled as far as we need ;
let us pitch our tents and be glad ! " I speak not, of course,
of those — unhappily too many — to whom life is of necessity
a perpetual struggle, and who must fight its battles or sleep
on the battle-field. I speak of those who have won a vic-
tory, or have compelled a truce, or have met no enemy —
those on whom the gods have smiled. How few of such
are willing to surrender themselves to the repose which is
the reward, and, one would think, should be the object of
the struggle ! Doubtless, the phenomenon, strange as it
is, has its place in the economy of Providence. Quaint,
pious and pedantical George Herbert has his solution of
the mystery. The blessing of repose, he tells us, was the
only gift withheld from man by his Creator, when He gave
to him all good things else :

"Let him keep the rest"— He said—
" But keep them with repining restlessnesse :
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast."

14 LEISURE.

It is, of course, not my business or purpose to deal with
the question in this point of view.

A wise and true philosopher — one of the most able and
enlightened thinkers and writers of the century, M. De Sis-
mondi, has left, among his various and admirable works,
some most attractive essays upon Political Economy. When
I say they are attractive, it will be readily understood that
they do not belong to the Adam Smith school, which, per-
haps, accounts for their not having been translated, except
partially, into our language. This is to be regretted, cer-
tainly, as there are none who need the lessons which they
teach, one-half so much as those who speak the English
tongue. I know no writings which develop, with anything
like the simplicity, wisdom and beauty of these essays, the
rational philosophy of what Political Economy should be, if
it aspires to rise above the level of a merely abstract science.
The fundamental principle upon which they rest is this — that
the human creatures who are assembled in society are, all
alike, the objects, and the true and only objects, of any
economical science which deserves the name; that Political
Economy, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, is but the
science of accumulating wealth ; while Political Economy, as
it should be, is the science of so accumulating and distributing
it, as best to promote the happiness and comfort of the men
and women who produce it. The one is a system as abstract
as the mathematics — the other is the philosophy of individual
and social happiness. The one deals with the producer as a
machine, or as a unit in a calculation. The other regards
him as a creature of flesh and blood — of hopes, desires and
capabilities — to whom there is a future as well as a present —

LEISURE. 15

for whose enjoyment and development society was instituted.
The object of the one is to cheapen the market — the object of
the other is to economize human suffering and toil.

And it was no superficial intelligence, no wild and dreamy
sentimentalism, by which this nobler theory of economical
science was built up. Its author was, in his practical politics,
a conservative liberal ; in his theories, a philosophical repub-
lican. He had no leaning to socialistic vagaries — no hunger
or thirst after novelties. Surpassed by no man of his genera-
tion, in the depth and comprehensiveness of his historical
researches and knowledge, he has this peculiarity, in the essays
to which I refer — that instead of reasoning from abstract
principles to abstract conclusions, and dealing with men like
the quantities in an algebraic equation, he rests every step
of his logic on some recorded experience of mankind, and
illustrates the fallacy of every error which he assails, by some
historical development of its consequences. What, therefore,
in the hands of other men, is but a barren theory of balancing
and compensating or conflicting laws, is with him the science
of practical humanity — of grand, and true and systematized
philanthropy. In such a connexion, statistical details, and
the phenomena of acquisition and production, are ennobled by
their direct and beneficent relation to human development.
Political Economy rises from the field of toil to the laborers
who plough its furrows and reap its harvests — from things
material to higher things — from territorial and commercial
wealth, to the ease, improvement and enjoyment of the millions
who dig its mines. So regarded, it enters into the wide range
of human relations — of men as between themselves — of the
rich to the rich, the poor to the poor, and the rich and the

16 LEISURE.

poor to each other. It goes into men's houses, like a blessed
charity, to kindle their hearth-fires and feed and clothe their
children. It sweetens toil and nurses weakness. It comforts
destitution, and has the oil and the wine of the Samaritan for
the wayfarer whom the Scotch philosophers would leave to
be stripped of his raiment, according to rule, by the thieves
among whom he falls. It thus becomes, not a science merely,
but a living, loving, human thing. And more especially — and
in this it comes within the range of our discussion to-night —
does it investigate the relation of man to his allotted labor —
not as enquiring of how much labor each man may be capable,
so as to swell an aggregate result for the community at large ;
but as determining the extent of the labor which it is necessary
for each man to undergo, so as to provide for his wants and
the fulfilment of his duties and responsibilities, and yet leave
him something of time, and its precious and manifold uses,
to himself.

Humanly speaking, and outside of those duties to others,
which are the noblest part of every man's career and its obli-
gations, I suppose I may assume that the man himself, his
own development and his happiness, are the real objects of life.
I may assume that we are sent into this world to enjoy our-
selves— rationally, intellectually, virtuously, and as responsible
beings, of course — but still to enjoy ourselves. In view of the
glorious faculties, the keen and exquisite and countless sensi-
bilities and susceptibilities, which bless our nature and would
but torment if were they given us for nought, it would be
sheer impiety to doubt the beneficent purpose for which they
are bestowed. If such then be the truth, it is plain logic,
that we waste our being, in proportion as we fling the oppor-

LEISURE. 17

tunities for enjoying it away. And yet to most of us — not
always from inclination, nor from perversity of our own, but
from the very necessity of the system, — the social organization
and habits which fetter us — what is the journey of life, but
a race of steam and horse-power, care, haste, fatigue and dust ?
As Longfellow translates from old Manrique —

" Our cradle is the starting place —
Of life we run the onward race,
And reach the goal."

Jockeyed and jockeying, we make it but a breathless trial of
mere speed. Our thought is of onward motion ; and the com-
pendium of our life-system, for the most part, is, that we
get over the ground and then — into it.

Let us prosecute, a little further, an inquiry which I
started a moment ago. How many men do we know, each
of us, who are willing, with moderate fortunes, to rest on
them — to give up or turn aside from their trades or their
professions — in order to cultivate their minds, to improve
and elevate their tastes, to form themselves for the duties of
that essential, but almost non-existent class among us — the
men of intelligence and cultivated leisure? We have high
authority for saying that " Wisdom . . . cometh by oppor-
tunity of leisure, and he that hath little business shall become
wise." How many do we know, any of us, who, in the
maturity of their faculties, are willing — we will not say to
desert their career, but to pause in it merely — nay, even to
slacken their pace, so that they may gather the fruit from
the trees under which they pass — that they may have the
opportunity of wisdom, of which the good man speaks ?
3

18 LEISURE.

How many will say — cheerfully, or at all — "the labor of
half the day suffices, I will devote the other half to myself ! "
Few, sadly few ! I grant you, that in the latter case the
thing is not so easy, even where a man may have the will.
We cannot remain part of a system and yet detach ourselves
from it. If we are in the current, we cannot linger in the
eddies. We must move on, or be left behind altogether.
For this, the system is, in the main, responsible. But the
other thing — the retirement of those who can afford to break
off from a system which coerces them — ought not to be diffi-
cult, and is not, where the will exists. It is a matter of
every day occurrence, in other countries — certainly on the
continent of Europe. Men wind up their affairs, invest their
money, accommodate their expenses to their means, and sit
down to be happy, while there is yet enough of the vigor of
life left to make enjoyment healthy and robust — while there is
enough of taste, appreciation and thought remaining, to be cul-
tivated and developed — to be made useful as well as graceful.
What an outburst of joyous freedom — what a dance upon
broken manacles and chains sundered forever — what a hymn of
gratitude and deliverance — is that inimitable essay of Charles
Lamb's — "The Superannuated Man" — wherein he tells the
story of a servitude of six-and-thirty years in a counting
house, brought happily to an end ! How he dwells, like a
liberated prisoner, on the toils and privations of his prison-
house — the infrequent holidays, which were over before he
could determine how they were to be enjoyed — the Sundays
which brought no relaxation — the week at Easter, which was
gone before its leisure was tasted — the wood of his desk,
which had entered into his soul ! And then the tumultuous

LEISURE. 19

gladness of his emancipation — the time that first, in all his life,
he could call his own — the plans, the pleasures and the inde-
pendence, upon a pension of two-thirds of a small salary ! —
" Had I a little son," he exclaims, in the rapture of his
soul — "I would christen him Nothing to Do. He should
do nothing." I am afraid that even in England, "Nothing
to Do " would have had a hard time of it. With us, I am
quite sure that his name would have interfered with his
getting a situation. The humorist would have found it an
unprofitable business to speak irreverently of the Evangel
of Labor.

What is the course under our system and with our ideas ?
Take professional men, for instance. We toil on, and toil on,
almost without exception, until waning mind and broken body
refuse to toil longer. We preach sermons — argue causes —
feel pulses — spur on our jaded faculties along the narrow
pathway of our traditional and artificial meditations, until the
spur is answered no more. And what is the effect of this
upon ourselves and the society of which we form a part?
Every man's pursuit, exclusively followed, draws a limited
portion of humanity within the circle of its light, leaving all
outside unseen and uncomprehended. We see what we look
for, in this world, and not much else. Niagara is one spectacle
to the artist or the poet, another to the geologist, and still
another to the man with a water-mill. The physician lives
in a world whose occupants are patients; and the human
phenomena, therefore, which he chiefly notices, are of the class
called symptoms. To the lawyer, humanity takes the aspect,
for the most part, of wrong attempted or resisted. His con-
templations are of the morbid subject, generally, like the

20 LEISURE.

physician's. His occupations are of a sort which, it has been
wisely said, may sharpen the edge, but are sure to narrow the
blade, of the mind. So, too, the clergyman, in his turn, is
apt to look at the world to which he ministers, only from the
point of view of the transgressions which render such minis-
tration needful. It is to him exclusively an abiding-place of
sanctity and sin, and he is therefore apt to see more of both
in it, than perhaps the facts will always justify. Thus it
is with all callings by which men's lives and faculties are
monopolized. Mr. Weller only exaggerated slightly, but in
a perfectly natural direction, when he represented the under-
takers as regarding mortality in the light of an institution
intended for their benefit.

The subject bears further illustration. What a solemn
speech is that jeering one of Hamlet's, when he sees the
grave-digger knocking the "sconce" of his imaginary law-
yer about with his "dirty shovel," and the learned man
" will not tell him of his action of battery ! " What a
comment is the whole of it upon a life which has gone
on in the exclusive pursuit of an engrossing, artificial and
restricted line of thought — from which, in spite of us, the
narrowing and hardening processes of professional education
and exercise have shut out art and literature — putting the
extinguisher upon poetry and fancy — making social enjoy-
ment a hasty and exceptional pleasure — and all the more, in
proportion to the success and reputation which have seemed
to reward the struggle ! How the nature becomes subdued,
upon the one side,

"To what it works in— like the dyer's hand."

LEISURE. 21

How false and partial and unhappy are the views which it
adopts, upon the other, of human life and character ! " It
seems to you/7 said Sydney Smith, addressing a congregation
of lawyers, " as if men were bound together by the relations
of fraud and crime. Laws were not made for the quiet, the
good and the just. You see and know little of them in your
profession, and therefore you forget them. . . . The lawyer
who tempted his Master, had heard of the sins of the woman
at the feast, without knowing that she had poured her store
of precious ointment on the feet of Jesus."

Take, now, the career of a successful physician — one who
pursues that profession as an active calling — who surrenders
his days and his nights to it, from youth to age — who fore-
goes social pleasures and the half of his domestic joys for
it — who sees his children grow up, without that personal,
parental contact which, more than all things else, is needful
to form the young to usefulness and honor. What do you
make of such a man — love and admire him as much as you
may ! He has discharged one class of duties, it is true. He
has done much good, beyond a doubt. He has been useful
in his generation, in the main, as an engineer of the human
machine. But how has he discharged that trust, of all
others the most imperative — the trust of his own gifts and
faculties — the great trust of himself? He has given physic
to society, as the mere lawyer has given it counsel. Has
either of them given to it the broadly cultivated powers — the
matured and ample intellect — the tastes and the time — which
belong to it, and to which it has a right, from every man,
according to his endowments and his opportunities? They
have conferred upon the Republic a doctor and a lawyer,

22 LEISURE.

instead of a man and a citizen. They have sacrificed to the
thirst of gain, or the excitement of rivalry and a second-rate
ambition, or the worship of a dominant idea, what they owed
to society and themselves; or they have, themselves, been
sacrificed by the vicious organization, the false principles,
the insatiable exigencies of society. The higher their abili-
ties and the purer and more conscientious their purposes and
labors, the more perilous their exposure to the relentless
demands of a system which drags into its vortex, first,
whatever is best and noblest in intellect and heart.

Contemplate, again, a merchant — one who has surrendered
himself from his early years to the pursuit of gain, or, if
you please, to the less sordid but equally engrossing excite-
ment which that pursuit engenders and feeds. What does
he come to be, under our system ? How does his occupation
mould and develop him ? If he is lucky and prudent, nay,
perhaps, if he is either, he grows rich. We will assume that
he does. He acquires power and influence, gains deference
and respect — which money generally commands for all practi-
cal purposes, and especially among a commercial people. But
what manner of man does he make of himself? Do you find
him balancing his accounts, closing his books, retiring, even
partially, from the busy scenes of excitement and acquisition,
to bestow any portion of his yet vigorous years upon private
life, upon social refinement and enjoyment, upon artistic tastes,
or literary pleasures, or humanizing occupations — the thousand
things that make men wiser and better, and civilize and enno-
ble nations ? How unwillingly the hand gives up the ledger,
even when it grows too weak to turn over the leaves? I
know some examples — a few — and no one respects and honors

LEISURE. 23

them more than I do — of men who, from conviction, have
withdrawn themselves from the active pursuit of trade, while
full of life, capacity, energy and prospect— content to garner
the grain which they had gathered, though the harvest was
not yet half cut. But the cases of such genuine manhood,
such high moral independence, such appreciation of life and
its true purposes, are painfully rare. You may find men
enough, who desert the legitimate paths of commerce, to enter
upon the more concentrated trade in money. You can lay
your hands on merchants enough, who will give up the
counting-room and the warehouse for the office — who will
leave what is really generous and attractive in commerce — its
large adventures, its liberal and manly competition — its broad
calculations — its study of daily events and political mutations
— the contemplation of national wants and foreign customs —
of trade and its laws — agriculture and its vicissitudes — the
changing seasons — the capricious winds, and the sea's perils.
All these things, which are within the scope of commerce,
when it is really a profession — you will find men enough to
surrender. They will retire from these, into the narrower
sphere of what they call employing capital — in other words,
dealing in money or its representatives. Like stout Cortes —
but with a far less manly purpose — they will sink their ships
and then build brigantines. And what comes of such changes ?
Is it leisure — with its graces, accomplishments and usefulness
to others ? Not a whit. They have laid no foundation for
such things, and have no taste or fitness for them when their
season arrives. Is it social expansion — broad views — public
spirit — great enterprise — noble example? Not at all — but
increasing wealth — time devoted more passionately and exclu-

24 LEISURE.

sively than ever, to its augmentation — busy intrigue, instead
of generous rivalry — hungry appetite, instead of liberal large-
ness of soul. And this is what dooms communities to petty
destinies : the fact that the machinery of large enterprise is
worked by small hands, and directed by small capacities, for
mean and narrow ends — the fact that the pursuit of gain,
for its own sake and multiplication, and not for what it
brings or for what it may foster or bless, is the exclusive
moral and lesson of mercantile life, as of every other vigorous
and active life that yearns and toils about us. Is such a
doom irreversible, I pray you ? Is it part of the unchange-
able nature of things ? Surely, history teaches no such lesson
of despair. Surely, we learn, from the annals of our race,
that it is not merely the pursuit of gain which corrupts — it is
its exclusive pursuit. It is only the surrender of life, and
heart, and hope to it, that transforms wealth from a blessing
into a gilded calamity to men and nations.

In the Columbian Library, at Seville, I saw an old book on
Cosmography, which had belonged to Christopher Columbus.
It seemed to have been the text-book of his meditations, so
full the margins were of notes in his handwriting. I noticed
that he had not failed to mark, with most especial care, each
passage in the ancient author, which told of spices, or of
precious stones or metals, to be found upon the hills or through
the valleys of the Indies. Indeed he had condensed such
observations on some pages ; and mountains all of gold, and
islands strewn with pearls, were what he had prefigured as
before him in his journey towards the setting sun. And yet,
who dims the glory of that pure and lofty soul with one
suspicion of a sordid thought? The wealth that made the

LEISURE. 25

Indies precious, was but the embroidered raiment of his
dreams, and moved him none the more to grovelling appetite,
than did the golden fringes of the clouds, beneath which,
evening after evening, he sailed into the darkness — Manhood
and Hope, like the angels in the legend, standing through its
watches by his helm !

So, in the good old times, when merchants were princes,
and deserved to be, the increase of wealth seemed of itself to
work an enlargement of men's ideas. There was a perpetually
expanding purpose in its pursuit — a " large discourse, looking
before and after." It had a past, on which it built, and a
future, for which it labored grandly. Commerce was not,
then, the speculation of to-day, or the hasty adventure of
to-morrow — the short turn — the sharp bargain — the keen-
scented thrift, snuffing news in advance of the mail. Glorious
breezes filled its sails. The "lovesick winds" that wafted
Cleopatra's barge, did not hover round more gorgeous canvas.
Its freight was art, and literature, and civilization. The sea-
weed, clinging now, like mourning drapery, along the marble
walls of Venice, does but assert a rightful fellowship with
splendor to whose triumphs the whole known sea was tribu-
tary. The pictures and the statues — the temples, the libraries,
the palaces and gardens of Genoa and Pisa — of Florence,
Bologna and Sienna — all tell the story of great thoughts and
noble tastes, which gold and trade may nurture, when nobleness
and greatness deal with them. Judged by such standards —
making all allowances for change of time and circumstance —
conceding on the one side all that it has done for freedom and
intelligence — requiring from it, on the other, fulfilment of the
obligations since imposed on it by all the grand discoveries
4

26 LEISURE.

which science and genius have given it for handmaids — trade,
as we find it now, is surely, in its spirit, far below the level
of the high and intellectual calling which made itself so
bright a name in history. I speak of its spirit and not of its
material progress — of its influence on the men who pursue it,
and not of its statistics. I am looking at the hand of the
dyer, and not at the garish colors which flaunt from his door.
The Son of Sirach has said, and I hope I may venture to say
it after him, without offence, that " a merchant shall hardly
keep himself from doing wrong, and a huckster shall not be
free from sin." I waive the question as to whether the
Hebrews, in the days when Ecclesiasticus was written, fur-
nished the most advantageous models of mercantile deport-
ment ; for I am quite persuaded that the great moralist told a
truth in this, which was intended for all time. And if it be
so difficult for men, in the legitimate paths of commerce, to
avoid its corrupting tendencies, I fear they hardly can improve
their chances by entering the still narrower walks of what
commonly is known as mercantile retirement. Does a man
widen the scope of his faculties, think you, or improve the
opportunities of competence or leisure, because he withdraws
himself from actual trade, to look after letting his money
out on interest? Does he enlarge the domain of his heart,
or open new sources of human sympathy, by watching the
fluctuations of the stock exchange or the loan-market ? Does
the old age of mercantile industry grow in dignity or reverence
under such influences? Does it thus heighten its claims to
sway the opinions, and rule the counsels, and fashion the tastes
and habits — nay, form the very destiny — of this magnificent
Republic ? Has it not rather let itself out on usury, with its

LEISURE. 27

capital, and made a sordid trade of its faculties and opportuni-
ties ? There may be — undoubtedly there are — some characters
so privileged, that they can walk through the daily temptations
of any calling, without a stain on their raiment. There are,
in all professions, men fortunately constituted, who can find
leisure in the midst of absorbing employment, and expansion
in the very pressure of the most contracting influences — to
whom literature blossoms, a spontaneous wayside flower, along
every path ; and art, and taste, and fancy, and graceful and
refining thought and occupation, come smiling and ministering,
like a reaper's joyous children who troop around him in the
harvest field. So, too, in the least liberal pursuits of trade,
are men, who gather and are generous — who grasp and yet
give — whose hearts grow with their fortunes, and whose intel-
lects expand with their experience — men with whom labor
seems compatible with leisure, and whose manly nature has
the ring of a metal purer than their gold. But such is not
the common experience of the world ; and it were not wise to
write philosophy altogether for the Happy Valley, whose soil
is the salt of the earth. We must deal with the rule — though
we be thankful for the exceptions.

In Holbein's Dance of Death — that marvellous series of
grim portraitures — is painted the coming of the fatal mes-
senger to men of every condition, as they are. He arrests
the lawyer — an ill-favored varlet, you may be sure — and drags
him away (in a direction happily not indicated), just as he is
about to dispute the authority of the summons, and is pro-
ducing the precedents to the contrary. He turns back the
physician, who, with the cup of healing in his hand, is hasten-
ing to stay death's own career elsewhere. He comes behind

28 LEISURE.

the merchant, who is weighing the golden proceeds of some
venture, and flings a human bone into the opposing scale.
The moral of these strange pictures is that of every-day
experience and life. It goes beyond the plain one, which the
vulgar eye sees in them. It is the folly — the absurdity — the
wantonness — of dedicating life, and all of hopes and enjoy-
ments that may be in it, to one absorbing, sole pursuit ; the
madness of wasting existence itself in the search after super-
fluous means of existence, instead of dedicating what suffices,
when found, to the rational ends of our being.

It is of course impossible that all the baneful influences to
which we have alluded, can operate upon the individuals
who compose a nation, and yet fail to affect the national
community itself. You cannot have the ocean at rest, when
every separate wave in it is tossed as by a tempest. Thus
there is, in the Republic of which we are citizens, the same
feverish unrest which makes the citizens themselves build
their houses of life upon quicksands — the same unwilling-
ness, perhaps incapacity, to appreciate and quietly enjoy the
blessings that are round about it. Of our actual greatness
and future glory — of our expanding wealth, and territory
and resources — the whole air is vocal with the tidings ; but
not a man, of those whom we call statesmen, lifts his voice
to bid us pause and be happy in what we have : if we are
free, to enjoy our freedom ; if we are wise, to profit by our
wisdom ; if we are wealthy and powerful, to sit down in the
sunshine of our wealth and power. With millions upon
millions of acres, which we can neither cultivate nor enjoy,
we are told that it is our policy to go searching after more.
With peace and plenty laughing at our doors, we are made

LEISURE. 29

to believe that we should welcome war, rather than not have
the things we cannot need, which are far away from us. Has
the age of political philosophers — of practical and honest
public thinkers — died out altogether with us? Is there no
one to tell us — with the voice of an authority which we will
respect — that the true grandeur of nations is to be found in
the development and happiness of the human creatures who
live under their institutions ; their true power in the virtue,
independence and cultivation of their citizens; their own
genuine and lofty mission, in their own example? For
one, I had rather see the nation under whose flag I was born,
compacted, for all time, within the limits where our fathers
left it — with friendly and admiring nations growing up
around it, enlightened by its example and blessed by its
vicinity — its wealth brought home to be enjoyed, instead of
being wasted in new conquests, or the search after something
more — its intellect devoted to its own civilization, instead of
being maddened by crusading enterprise and the discord of
ambitions — I had rather see this, than witness, as its destiny,
the most magnificent march of empire that ever trod human
hearts beneath its feet. I had rather see what already is our
own, made to blossom with the arts of peace and beauty,
than to hear of a province conquered, daily, for pensions,
pre-emption rights, and land warrants ! I should hold one
fruitful, joyous, civilizing and refining hour of national repose,
more precious than the most prodigal decade of national
aggrandizement.

There is, I am aware, a great deal of rhetoric on the other
side of these views — a great deal of very obvious declamation,
about ignoble ease, individual sloth and national stagnation.

30 LEISURE.

But all this is merely a begging of the question in dispute.
I deny that a life of repose — not of idleness, but of leisure
and wholesome rest — is more ignoble or more unprofitable,
in man or nation, than the throb and throe — the convulsive
preternatural activity — of labor, without enjoyment and with-
out end. I do not mean that rest which is typified by the
Chinese hieroglyphic of happiness — an open mouth and a
handful of rice. I mean the repose which is the parent of
wise activity, and the restraint, as well as the substitute, of
activity which is not wise. I mean the rest which is won
and deserved by labor, and which sweetens and invigorates
it, and furnishes its reward. Whence comes this doctrine, that
life — to be anything — must be forever in motion ? There is
no process of physical development which does not need and
depend upon repose. To all the green and beautiful things
that deck the earth — the flowers that give it perfume, and the
fruits and foliage that make it glad — there are needful the calm
sunshine and the peaceful shade — the gentle rain and the yet
gentler dew. Not a gem that flashes, but has been crystal-
lized in the immovable stillness of the great earth's breast !
It is impossible to look on the most wondrous scenes of
physical grandeur, where the convulsions of nature have
left their traces on mountain and valley, without feeling
that the quiet centuries, gliding in between, have woven
the tranquil vesture of their beauty. I know no difference
from this in the laws of our moral and intellectual nature ;
and I believe that to be false philosophy and pernicious
morality which denies to individuals, as it is misguided and
perverse political economy which takes away from nations,
their seasons of leisure and meditation — teaching them that

LEISURE. 31

existence was meant to be nothing but a struggle, and that it
stagnates and is worthless when its strife grows still.

But it is to be feared that the evils which we are considering
are not so much the result of vice or conviction, as of instinct
and constitution. They seem to have come to us from our
Anglo-Saxon progenitors, and are perhaps a part of the
penalty which we have to pay for our inherited share of the
restless activity and predominance of the race. There is a
charming little book by Emile Souvestre, well known in
English as the "Attic Philosopher" a most delightful, genial
picture of simple pleasures and moderate desires — of humble
but serene enjoyment, and homely yet blessed charities and
consolations. I do not, however, mention the volume merely
to praise it — though it deserves all praise and gratitude — but
in order to ask you whether you think the scenes of such a
volume could be laid in any part of this vast continent, which
toils and grows prosperous beneath the pressure of Anglo-
Saxon energy and institutions. Can we conceive such a book
to be the truthful story of a life led within the atmosphere
of any great city of our confederation — a life of contentment,
in the pettiest fortunes — reduced to the first and actual neces-
sities, yet happy, contemplative, useful, independent, respected
and self-respecting? Surely not. Such things are not the
growth of the principles under which we live and move.
They could never be developed under the influence of a social
and political economy which inflames one-half the intelligent
manhood of our country with the hot thirst of public life —
which stigmatizes every man as a drone, whose existence does
not burn, like a heated wheel, from the friction of ceaseless
revolution. Their impossibility is a leading characteristic of

32 LEISURE.

our especial race, more than of any other that has ever sweated
beneath the sun. It has given to the great empire from which
we chiefly draw our national descent — and to which we are
indebted for those immortal institutions, dyspepsia and trial
by jury — its place of honor among the mighty ones of the
earth. It has swept the forests from half a hemisphere
around us, and has filled it with a mighty, feverish, restless,
pallid people — capable of everything but rational enjoyment
and tranquil happiness.

Is there a nation, think you, save ours, on the face of the
civilized earth, that has no national amusements except politics
and steamboat excursions ? — no manly, simple, common sports,
which win crowds on holidays to robust and honest exercise
and joy? — no links between boyhood and manhood, in the
remembrances of common and innocent pleasure ? We have,
of course, the exotic enjoyments of music and the drama —
though in but a modified degree, since a large part of the
community are too good, and a very large part too busy, or
too bad, to take genuine and healthy interest in them. But
these have come to us — such as they are. They are not our own.
We have, in fact, no national holidays, save of a political
complexion ; and the sports of those days are fierce excitements
rather, of which the less that is said the better. I do not
mention Thanksgiving, because its principal secular occupation
is dinner, and that is too much of an unprofitable pleasure, we
all know, to be permitted to occupy much of our valuable time.

Consider another significant fact. Ours is a government
entirely popular — in its practice even more so than in its
theory. The people control it — it does their will — and every
aspirant to power must kiss the hem of their garment, and

LEISURE. 33

does so. Yet is it not strange that scarcely anywhere —
through the whole extent of the country — is there a public
walk, for the luxury and health of the people, to be found ?
You may spend millions on improving the trade of a town —
on railroads and canals, to bring merchandize and people to
it and carry them away from it — but legislators can scarcely
be found, except here and there, willing to take the responsi-
bility of expending a few thousands on the people themselves
— on the commonest provision for their enjoying the free air,
and sitting and walking with their wives and children round
them, in comfort, underneath the blessed open skies. And
why is this ? Why is not even a bid made for popularity, by
doing what ought to be so popular? Simply because, as I
have said over and over, our thought and our policy, and our
legislation, are of the trades we drive and not of the human
creatures that drive them. Because we are looking — constitu-
ents and representatives alike — to the money we make, and
not to ourselves, the poor slaves that make it. Because, like
the youth in the Eastern story, when we go down into the
magician's cave, and busy ourselves with the treasures there,
the door of the cavern closes behind us on the beautiful things
of earth and heaven. Why should we provide means of
enjoyment, for the leisure of people who have no leisure?
Has not Poor Richard said that "leisure is time for doing
something useful ? "

"Get all you can, and what you get hold,
Is the stone that will turn all your lead into gold!"

How can a man waste time, which is so profitable, in the
mere unbending of his heart and mind — the paltry refresh-
5

34 LEISURE.

ment of his weary body ? The true cause — disguise it as you
will — of the absence of those occupations which dignify, and
those relaxations which improve and gladden leisure, is that
there is no leisure to be improved, gladdened or dignified.
We realize no time but the present, and that only, in the
sense of what Hood so aptly calls,

" The present tense of toil ! "

But after, and in embarrassing connection with this enumer-
ation of the evils to be modified or cured — comes always the
perplexing question — what is the cure? It is not easy to
change the habits of a people — to call a halt upon the march
which, they have been taught, is their allotted journey from
the arms of the mother that bore them, to the bosom of the
universal mother. But, nevertheless, there is a point at
which all revolutions begin; and those beginnings are often
so small, that no man who has at heart the good of his species
should falter or despair at finding them apparently insignifi-
cant or hopeless. It is not from the sons of toil, in the
accepted sense of the word, that a commencement is to be
looked for, when the burden of that toil is to be lightened.
It is not by the less educated portion of the community, or
the less refined, that a change is to be wrought in favor of
that leisure which gives scope for education, and the oppor-
tunity for refinement. The revolution is to commence at the
summit, and not at the base of society ; and it is a farce to
say that because this is a republic, society has no base and no
summit. The subordination of wealth to matured intelli-
gence, cultivated taste, social accomplishments and virtues,
and all those qualities and gifts which make one man superior

LEISURE. 35

to another — in spite of the Declaration of Independence — and
one citizen worthier and more valuable to his country than
another — can only be the result of a movement among the
more favored classes themselves. If it comes from those who
are less fortunate, it will incur, and may deserve, the reproach
of envy and hatred ; and it must necessarily provoke antagon-
ism, and lose its influence and effect, by taking the shape
of a class-revolution. It is only the successful who can,
without suspicion, cry aloud against the excesses and perils
of success. It is only those who are favored with occupation,
or are above the need of it, who can, without suspicion, ask a
truce in favor of the claims and blessings of leisure and
repose. It is perfectly vain and idle to expect that the
millions, who are toiling up the hill, will pause, unless those
who have ascended it before them will come down and meet
them, as brothers, on the way. If those to whom Provi-
dence has vouchsafed education and liberal studies, and refin-
ing and intellectual occupation, will cast them all into the
furnace (to vary Macaulay's admirable illustration), so that
out of their gold may be made a calf, which they are content
to adore — how can those with humbler opportunities and
lower cultivation be expected to lift themselves into a loftier
and purer worship ? Upon those who have won the victories
of life — to much or little purpose — are the responsibilities
which belong to their position. Men are not worthy to be
the leaders of society, if they are not willing to undertake its
guidance, and enlighten it by their example. One single
private life, made noticeable by honorable effort and elevated
tone — dignified, in its labors, by fidelity and moderation, and
in its leisure, by cultivation and true refinement — is, in itself

36 LEISURE.

and its attendant courtesies and charities, a noble republican
institution. It is among the noblest, and worth a Senateful
of demagogues and wranglers. When I see a man like
George Peabody — a man of plain intellect and moderate
education — who is willing to take away from the acquisi-
tions of successful trade, what would make the fortunes of a
hundred men of reasonable desires, and dedicate it to the
advancement of knowledge and the cultivation of refining
and liberal pursuits and tastes, among a people with whom
he has ceased to dwell, except in the recollections of early
industry and struggle — I recognize a spirit which tends to
make men satisfied with the inequalities of fortune — which
is alive to the true ends and purposes of labor — which gives
as well as takes — which sees, in the very trophies of success,
the high incumbent duties and the noble pleasure of a stew-
ardship for others. And yet, one such man — in himself — in
his life and the example which it gives — is worth tenfold
more to a community, than all the beneficence of which his
heart may make him prodigal. And in that sense, the
humblest of us may be benefactors to society. We have all
one gift, at least, we can bestow on it — one Institute we
can found — ourselves — cultivated, refined, developed, to the
extent of our susceptibilities and faculties. And to this
we come back, at last — that the only political or moral
economy, whose lessons are other than a snare, is that which
makes the vast workings of trade, and business, and profes-
sion— the struggles, inequalities and toils of life — subservient
to individual development and happiness.

Let us then endeavor, practically, to divest ourselves of the
unworthy idea, that we were made to be the slaves of our

LEISURE. 37

callings and not their masters. Let us strive — each in his
allotted sphere, and with his influence, much or little — to live
down the false philosophy which makes unrest and labor the
only attributes of human duty, and spurns, as ignoble, tran-
quillity and contemplation. If ever a country needed the
existence and services of a class whose habits and influence
should counteract the feverish tendency of the whole race to
excitement and the frenzy of gain and competition, ours is
that one. We must cease worshipping men who are merely
rich, as heroes. We must cease to regard all life as stagnant,
except that whose waters are a whirlpool. We must learn to
consider the season of toil as but the seed-time of rest. We
must quench something of our thirst for public life and its
excitements. We must recreate private life as a social institu-
tion, hedged around by the sanctities that belong to it and
make it reverend. Men must teach their children that the
private station, if honorably filled, is indeed the post of honor.
Public men must be taught, by public opinion — in the shape,
if need be, of public scorn — that to elevate the people, and not
to flatter or corrupt them, is the road of successful ambition.
Our moralists must cease their crusades against innocent
amusements, and allow cakes and ale to other people, though
they insist on being virtuous themselves. Our economists
must spike the guns which they keep always levelled at the
leisure that ventures to dwell or show itself where there is not
a sign over the door. Those who work, in their turn, must
forego their jealousy of those who rest. Those who have not
enough, or who believe that they have not, or intend to get
more whether they have enough or not, must learn that it is
bad sense, as well as bad taste and bad manners, to sneer at

38 LEISURE.

the refining occupations and modest desires of those who are
willing to go upon the retired list, though with but half-pay.
The social manifestations of wealth, too, must be something
more than fine mansions, equipages and upholstery. Its pride,
its pleasures, and its distinguishing characteristics must lie
less in these. It must set itself to work to acquire or develop
tastes, as well as to buy the products of taste. It must honor,
and strive to appreciate, art, as well as encourage artists —
which though an excellent, is a very different thing. It must
read books, as well as collect them in Gothic or Elizabethan
book-cases. It must live in its houses, and open its doors, in
sympathy and not in ostentation, to all who deserve to enter,
and must make them welcome to the elevating influences
which should dwell within. It must widen the social plat-
form, so that all who are worthy may have room to stand on
it. Men must be taught, by its encouragements, that their
social position depends upon what they are — not upon what
they have — that they can be poor and yet be prized. There
must be an end of the humiliating and degrading doctrine —
practically the maxim of the land — that all things worthy
of struggle and ambition are like the mistletoe of the Druid, to
be gathered only with a golden sickle. Thus, and not other-
wise, can men be induced to turn aside, from their business
and its gains, to themselves. Thus, alone, can they be tempted
to cultivate the leisure which mak«s them men, instead of
sacrificing what is best in them to the toil which makes them
only rich.

Is this Utopia? It may be — yet, if it be, republicanism
is Utopia likewise — for this, in its essence and its details, is
neither more nor less than practical republicanism, rescued

LEISURE. 39

from the manipulations of the theorist and the unclean
hands of the demagogue, and brought back to its legiti-
mate and simple purpose — the advancement of human happi-
ness. If it is not capable of condescending to so commonplace
a destiny — if it is

"too bright and good

For human nature's daily food " —

if all its paraphernalia of principles and institutions can bring
us nothing better, as their consummation, than a national life
of turmoil and excitement, to grow powerful, and an indi-
vidual life of toil and sacrifice, to grow rich — it has fooled
the world, and us especially, with a pretended mission, and
should be listened to no more. Better bid it — with Bar-
dolph's cozeners — "set spurs and away, like three German
devils, three Doctor Faustuses," in search of " the solidarity
of the peoples," or some similar Will of the Wisp ! I
confess that I have a better opinion of it ; and it is because
I have, that I have ventured on so earnest an appeal, in
its behalf— as I understand it.

VALEDICTORY ADDEESS

TO THE

GRADUATING CLASS

OF THE

SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND,

DELIVERED AT THE

HOLLIDAY STREET THEATRE, BALTIMORE,
MARCH SD, 1869.

VALEDICTORY.

Gentlemen of the Graduating Class :

TOUR Faculty has seen fit, on the present occasion, as
the distinguished Provost has informed you, to depart
from the long-established custom which would have given
you the pleasure of receiving, from the lips of one of its own
members, the cordial welcome and God-speed which I am
commissioned to offer you. Had I not been educated in the
doctrine of implicit faith and passive obedience, where my
medical advisers are concerned, I might have ventured to
doubt whether it was altogether fair, in the last hour of your
immediate connexion with the University, to deprive you
of the benefit of those wise counsels which none could give
you half so well as the experienced, able and accomplished
men in whose name I have the honor to address you. Certain
it is, I should have shrunk, with unaffected self-distrust, from
the attempt to represent them, had they not relieved me
from the duty to do more than speak for them a few kind,
parting words.

Although a member of a different profession from yours, I
fancy, Gentlemen, that my experience and observation of the
struggles, temptations and disappointments of that to which

43

44 VALEDICTORY.

I belong, have given me a reasonable comprehension of the
difficulties which beset your path. Upon the other hand, I
have so often witnessed at the Bar the triumphs of industry,
energy and fidelity to duty over the same obstacles, that I
feel justified in promising the rewards of your own elevated
calling, to those of you who dedicate yourselves to it man-
fully, as it deserves.

And here, let us understand each other, once for all. When
I speak of professional success and the rewards of professional
ability and effort, I do not mean — for I should hold it an
insult to your aspirations to present you — only the grosser
and more tangible results which take the shape of popularity
and pay. No sensible man despises or pretends to overlook
these, of course. The atmosphere of human life, bright as
it may be with the rosiest visions, still rests upon the ground.
Love, even, we have high authority for saying — though I
receive it with indignant doubt — will sometimes fly out at the
window when poverty but peeps in at the door. Among the
most fanciful of medical theories, I believe I am safe in sup-
posing, there are none which affect to dispense altogether with
the process of nutrition. And then, too, the love of applause
is so perpetual a spur — to speak, perhaps, more appropriately
— so pleasing a stimulant, to the noblest natures; it is so
mixed up with our highest and purest and most genial im-
pulses, that to discourage it would be like blunting our sense
of the good and the beautiful, or blotting out any other of
those fine, great instincts which are the celestial leaven of
humanity. Whether the thirst after a reputation which we
shall enjoy in life, or the craving for a name which shall live
after us, be the more effectual incentive to the things which

VALEDICTORY. 45

make men great, I am not here to discuss. It is a question
which the debating-societies have left unsettled ; and I suppose,
after all, that its solution depends, in a great degree, upon the
mental and moral organization of individuals. There is to
almost every one, and there should be to all, a charm in the
visible tributes of public admiration and respect. When,
therefore, the world crowds around a man, burning myrrh
and frankincense, he naturally enjoys the present swinging
of the censers, a good deal more than the prospect of their
smoking, ever so devoutly, at his funeral. The honors which
come home, like fruits and flowers in season, while taste and
appetite are fresh and the senses yet rejoice in fragrance and
beauty, are apt to win even the loftiest and greatest from lone
dreams of palms and bay trees, which shall be watered in
centuries to come. When we think, for instance, of Raphael,
in the full splendor of his triumphs and his fame, the friend
of Popes and Cardinals and Princes, beloved of women,
envied and adored by men — the very " centre of a world's
desire " — we feel that we should scarcely marvel if, amid such
fascinations, he forgot the beckoning angels of his youth.
And yet, when we remember Raphael, dead in the chamber
where he painted, with the fresh canvass of the Transfigura-
tion radiant above his bier and making its mortality immortal,
we wonder how any creature with a soul, could barter the
prescience, nay, even the mere dream, of such a glory, for
any other thing that life could give.

Do not, I pray you, think that I am leading you away to
cloud-land. It is one of the sad mistakes of our generation,
that to be practical you must descend ; and the lower you
descend the more practical you become. There is a growing

46 VALEDICTORY.

contempt for everything that cannot be measured or counted ;
and the busy men, whose mission upon earth is to have irons
in the fire, have a sort of notion that the world has grown
too old and wise to let sentiment be a hindrance to results.
Society says to the moralist, as Scrooge said to Marley's
Ghost, " Don't be hard upon me ! Don't be flowery, Jacob ! "
But, unless we have made up our minds, conclusively and in
despair, that we must take the faciiis descensus, without
thought of where it leads, it is clear that some one must look
upward and point upward. Ignoble practices and doctrines
must be confronted by nobler teachings from some quarter ;
and it seems to me the special obligation of those whose
studies and vocation are intellectual, and consequently elevat-
ing in themselves, to set the example of a loftier standard
in both purpose and pursuit. When, therefore, I address
gentlemen, like you, just entering, with the vigor and enthu-
siasm of fresh manhood, upon an honorable and — if you will
it — an eminent career, I feel that the most truly practical
things that I can say to you are those which lift your minds
and hearts up to the very highest reach of thought and duty.
I do not, of course, invite you to listen to sad moralities out
of Rasselas, nor to beautiful sentiments such as those which
our acquaintance, Mr. Surface, has so often uttered on these
boards. Yet, I conceive that I but point the moral of your
scientific education in the venerable University with whose
benison you now go forth, when I warn you against the
seductions which would lead you from the true and ennobling
aims of your profession, in search of those rewards which
only gratify vanity or purchase ease. Lament it as we may,
it cannot be honestly denied that in our country, in the days

VALEDICTORY. 47

in which we live, the chief temptation with which young men
of ability and ambition have to struggle, is that which places
wealth and notoriety before them as the sufficient ends of
practical life. Whether it be the natural and necessary effect
of our system of government as administered, or of bad seed
planted early somewhere in our political and social soil, or
of circumstances and influences which have misdirected our
national career, it boots not to inquire. It is enough for us
to know and recognize the fact, that to live upon the common
breath — the popular is aura — is every day judged more and
more the worthiest life ; and to put money in the purse is held,
yet more and more, its highest, chief concern. The reputa-
tion of excellence has grown to be taken for as good a thing
as excellence itself, and the influence and power which come
from accumulated wealth are esteemed better than the virtues
and the culture which would give it dignity and grace. It is
not worth that makes the man, but what the man is worth.
Of course, there are many patriots who will say that this is
unpatriotic, and crowds of successful and rising people who
will laugh at it as mere "theory," which they regard as
synonymous with nonsense. But, Gentlemen, we are under no
obligation — we have no right — to deny what we see, because
others will not use their eyes, or are blind ; nor can we accept
as our standard of morals, the precepts and practice of those
who have none. It is, therefore, with the most urgent entreaty
that I appeal to you, for your own sakes — for the sake of
the science you profess and the society you may adorn — to
remember and cherish the dignity of your calling, and your
own respect as its ministers, amid the seductions to which
its prosecution is especially exposed.

48 VALEDICTORY.

I need not tell you what your calling signifies, nor what is
tributary to it. It sweeps, in its high scope, the whole sphere
of physical and moral science. It leads you into all the
recesses and arcana of nature. It is a pursuit, the zest of
which is forever heightened and freshened by new discovery,
and which perpetually opens new vistas of curious, or delight-
ful, or sublime speculation. It ranges from the contemplation
of the mightiest elemental forces, through the most simple
and the most intricate developments of primordial law, down
to the study of the minutest atoms which only the microscope
sees floating in the viewless air. And yet, comprehensive as
it is, it has none of the coldness or the barrenness of abstrac-
tion about it. You can grasp its results as with your hand —
nay, as you would grasp the hand of a friend, for they are
as full of substantial sympathy as of thought. Like the
Chaldean, it watches, with its guarded flocks around it, and
warms the young lambs in its bosom, while its gaze is on the
stars. All the fruits of its grand ventures come back with it
to visit the abodes and comfort the afflictions of men. Surely
its functions are a worship in themselves, and its priesthood
should enter its temple with heads uncovered and uplifted
hearts. Of course, its highest places are above the common
reach. But all its places, when honorably filled, are places
of honor, be they high or low. And even the most humble
of them are a sort of mystery to the world at large. Men,
for the most part, take your profession upon trust, and their
very confidence puts you upon honor to deal fairly with them.
At the same time it offers you the temptation to be false, if
you will. You may deceive society, if you choose, and get
money and reputation by cheating it, if you are clever and

VALEDICTORY. 49

dishonest. Know you ever so little, you will know more
than the most of those who put faith in you ; and you will
generally have the advantage which he who knows anything,
always has over him who knows less. You may be impostors
and mountebanks, and know yourselves and be known to
your brethren to be such, and yet prosper like sages, through
the credulity of those who are more ignorant than you.

In the profession to which I belong there is, of course,
some room for the same sort of imposture. But, for the
most part, you have much the advantage of us in the oppor-
tunities for quackery. There is the sanction of an old, and
therefore, I suppose we must presume, authentic story, for
fearing that the earth covers up much of your evil behavior.
The Roman populace gave countenance, on a memorable
occasion, to this scandalous idea, for when the good Adrian
VI was gathered to his fathers, you remember they adorned
the house of his physician with garlands, and inscribed on
it : " To the deliverer of his country ! " In Spain, where
the physician still carries the gold-headed cane which used
to be the wand of your office, he never attends the funerals
of his patients. There is a sort of popular superstition, that
he would be reversing Scripture and following his works.
The misdeeds of our profession, on the contrary, rest mainly
on the earth's surface, and an autopsy is commonly a matter
of course. We are confronted in the discharge of our most
important duties by astute and zealous rivals, weighed by
impartial judges and observant juries, under the challenge of
public scrutiny. What we do most privately is open always
to the suspicions and the questioning of adverse interests.
Nobody thinks of going to the apothecary's to criticise your
7

50 VALEDICTORY.

prescriptions, after your patient has set out on the " Her tene-
bricosum;" but there is a lively solicitude, generally, concern-
ing the last will and testament which we have prepared for
him. The mourners often go about the streets which lead to
the recording-offices, when they would hardly

"Visit at new graves
In tender pilgrimage" —

as poor Hood sighs.

Nor does the difference end here. Your relation is neces-
sarily personal and domestic, as well as professional, towards
those whom you advise. We are often, doubtless, the private
counsellors, the family advisers of our clients, but we are most
generally introduced to that professional occupation through
the doors of interest. Your duty, on the other hand, leads
you to men's confidence through their tenderest solicitudes
and their affections. They look to you for succor, hope and
consolation. You see them in physical suffering, or broken
by the anguish which springs from love and sympathy. You
know the secrets of families, their sorrows, their troubles, their
weaknesses. If not confessors, you are oftentimes confidants,
constantly spectators, of what the world knows not. The
trust, therefore, which is reposed in you is not only sacred,
but blind, and the greater, in proportion, is the baseness of
being false to it. And by this, of course, I do not mean the
vulgar baseness of betraying confidence, for on that point no
gentleman of any profession can need counsel. I refer to the
falsehood which is involved in dealing with those who have
absolute faith in you, so that you shall pass with them for
what you are not; so that you shall attain the popularity

VALEDICTORY. 51

which comes from pleasing and pretending, instead of that
which springs from toiling and deserving. I know very
well that necessity is turbulent and lawless. I know the
heart-sickness of hope deferred — the " fever of vain longing."
I know how tempting is that royal road which leads to suc-
cess, though it may not lead to science. I fully understand
how hard it is for a poor man to go on delving in the mine,
in search of the true metal, when he can gather surface-earth
by handfuls, and sell it readily for gold. I am familiar with
the snares which are set by the lax morals and the follies of
society for self-love, for cupidity, for sloth, for weakness, and
I appreciate the intellectual and moral force which it requires
to keep your feet from them all. But, Gentlemen, the capacity
to withstand those temptations and overcome those difficulties
is the test of your ability to rise above the dead level of your
calling. It is that which will determine whether you are
fit for what you undertake to-day — whether your names will
be heard among your fellows and remembered, or be counted,
unknown, by the dozen, for oblivion.

All cannot be great men, as I have said already, in your
profession or in any. The range of excellence and usefulness,
however, is happily immense, upon this side of greatness.
There are lesser heights, quite high enough for rational ambi-
tion— too high for anything but toil and courage to attain.
Fortunate are they who can reach even these, after years of
patient and conscientious struggle. Without patience and
without struggle, let no man fool himself into the hope of
treading them. The world, outside, has but a limited idea,
and even a more limited appreciation, of what it costs, in heart
and brain, to earn a well-deserved professional superiority.

52 VALEDICTORY.

The ready faculties, the quick resource, the knowledge,
accurate and copious, which comes at call ; the self-reliance
which has grown from self-distrust and mastered it ; the ease
which springs from difficulties habitually fought and over-
come; all these appear so simple to the common thought,
that it mistakes them for a happy inspiration. It fancies, I
dare say, for instance, that your venerable Professor of Sur-
gery has become what he is — one of the foremost men of all
his time — mainly by the cheap and lucky accident of genius.
Gentlemen, I have entreated you not to impose upon the
world — let me beg you not to let the world cheat you. Let
not its folly or its flattery — its untaught or depreciating
estimate of what it takes to make a man of science — bewilder
or seduce you. You can be charlatans, readily ; quacks, with
all the ease in the world. You can be puffed into prominence
by politics or fashion, and "pull wires," as it is called, to
your advantage, when you will, if you do not object to soil-
ing your hands. But, if you cherish the profession to which
you belong, for what is noble in its aims and elevating in its
pursuit ; if you have taken up, in good earnest, the following
after truth ; if you love science for its own sake, and are its
disciples because you love it ; you have the work of a life-
time before you, and he trifles with your intelligence and your
manhood who tells you otherwise.

I am aware that I am probably addressing some whose
ambition is moderate, and whose expectations will be fully
met, if they are able to secure to themselves a comfortable
support from their profession and a respectable position in its
ranks. I should be very sorry were I understood as meaning
to depreciate that large and honorable class — the men of mod-

VALEDICTORY. 53

erate professional ability and attainments — or to exclude them
from the scope of the reasoning which I have endeavored
to present. So far am I from this, that I regard them as
specially within its purview. Something is always conceded
to the eccentricities of genius. Men whose abilities and skill
are so great as to make them necessary to society, can generally
deal with it on their own terms. Much is pardoned to those
whom we cannot do without. We take them, as the lawyers
say, cum onere — with all their imperfections on their heads.
With mediocrity, no matter how respectable, there are fewer
compromises. The market is full of it, and this lessens the
demand and cheapens the commodity. Apart therefore from
the obligation of professional truthfulness and integrity, which
is as binding on the humble as on the exalted, there is the
additional inducement embodied in the somewhat low-toned
moral proposition, that "honesty is the best policy." And
there is still another consideration which is worthier. The
less gifted members of your profession have to deal, as a gen-
eral rule, with a lower grade of intelligence in their patients,
and are less conspicuously placed before the public scrutiny
than their more fortunate brethren. The temptation to impos-
ture is therefore the greater with them; first, because it is
easier, and then because it is less readily found out. Besides,
it saves an infinite amount of trouble. When I picture to
myself, for example, a country physician, who is expected to
carry science and medicine to everybody's door, as King
Alfred is reputed to have carried justice ; whose saddle-bags
are looked to, by half a legislative district, as containing

"All simples that have virtue
Under the moon;"

54 VALEDICTORY.

I must frankly admit his title to be classed among the un-
crowned martyrs. I cannot wonder if, with the weakness
of humanity, he should give up the studies for which he
scarce has time, nor if the enthusiasm which once warmed
him should be jaded into empiricism and routine. But, if it
be so, it is simply because he is not made of the right stuff.
It is because he was born into a world where difficulties surge
breast-high, without the pluck to overcome them. He has
gone to sleep, like Christian, in the arbor on the hill-side.
He was called but not chosen. Least of all men could he do
without the moral supports which prop up failing endeavor ;
least of all could he forego the high resolves which may be
so engrafted on a feeble nature as to bring heroism out of
sheer irresolution.

I use the proud word, heroism, in its proudest sense. Your
calling has its battles, which demand the courage of the tented
field, without the war-cry to inflame it ; without the drum-
beat, or the banners, or the fanfare of the trumpets. I am
not thinking of its walks amid the pestilence; its midnight
visitation of the dens of sin and crime ; its calm defiance of
the sun and storms that slay. Nor do I mean the prowess
of the iron nerve, which, in the very face of the Destroyer,
can parry, with unshaken hand, his dart as it descends. It
is the silent, endless, unseen toil of which I speak ; the stern
forgetfulness or sacrifice of self; the sleepless vigilance ; the
tranquil energy ; the patience which repines not ; the zeal for
truth and knowledge, which has all the passionate vigor of
enthusiasm, without its restlessness or fluctuation. A man
who has these qualities is of heroic stature, call him what you
may. In your profession there is no one truly great who is

VALEDICTORY. 55

not, more or less, endowed with them. And if there be a
profession which should elicit and develop them, it is yours.
In that of which I am an humble member there is undoubt-
edly more of the stimulus which comes from personal collision
and triumph. Its contests are dramatic. Its excitements stir
the blood. Its successes, sometimes, have the glow and flush
of victory in downright strife. It has all that is animating
and ennobling in the grapple of mind with mind, the rivalry
of skill, experience and courage, wrestling with courage,
experience and skill. But the triumph dies almost with the
struggle ; and the reputation of the lawyer who has led his
Bar for half a lifetime, is as transitory, nearly, as the echoes
of his voice. He contributes little or nothing to the stock
of human knowledge. He has given himself to the study
and application of a science — if indeed it be a science — which
as often deals with artificial principles and dogmas as with
great, abiding truths. In grasping at the philosophy of juris-
prudence, he is fettered, even in this day and generation, by
precedents of scholastic absurdity which date back before the
Wars of the Roses, and by statutes the very records of which
were lost before the Reformation. The scientific aim and
effort of his professional life is simply to show that " thus it
is written." The legacy which he is able to leave behind him
to society is therefore rarely better, in his best estate, than a
tradition of high faculties, fearlessly and honestly dedicated
to justice and duty. Even the triumphs of oratory — once
the perpetual grace and honor of the forum — can now rarely
come to him. The pressure of business and the fashion of
the time have limited discussion in the courts, and stripped
its forms almost to nakedness. As, in the British Parliament,

56 VALEDICTORY.

the orator has made way for the debater, so, at the bar, the
practical statement has superseded the oratorical display. The
glory of old days has fled from us, in this, and eloquence has
gone — to Congress.

Of course you understand me, in speaking of professional
inducements and rewards, in this connexion, as referring to
those only which belong to the Bar in its legitimate, exclusive
sphere. I am discussing the lawyer, as distinguished from
the politician on the one hand, and the law-giver on the
other. The politician finds his opportunities in the profes-
sion, and may make it his base of prosperous operations ; but
his rewards and, let us trust, his aims and responsibilities, are
outside of it. The law-giver may rise from the profession to
his loftier vocation, but the two are not the same ; and even
if they were, his opportunities of greatness — always far apart
among the centuries — must soon be parcelled out, as the
world goes, between the pockets of the lobby and the pas-
sions of the mob.

It is your fortune, Gentlemen, that of the laws you study
the hand of man writes none and alters none. Blindness
may read them not, or foolishness misread ; but immemorial
Nature is made up of them, and while it lives they cannot
perish or be shorn of their dominion. A great light of your
profession and of literature — the author of Religio Medici —
speaks to us of Nature, as " that universal and public manu-
script that lies expanded unto the eyes of all." How few
of those who study it most closely, can translate its mystic
language — how often the wisest may be dazzled by its illumi-
nated pages, or lost in the great depths of its abounding
lore — you may learn from the records of human error, which,

VALEDICTORY. 57

alas ! tell the completest story of human wisdom. But you
have the consolation of knowing, while you strive to read,
that truth is there before your eyes, and that at last they may
be kindled to discern it. The humblest patient hand may
cleanse at least some little portion of the mighty palimpsest,
and feel its pulses burn with joy and reverence as the live
word comes flashing out at last. If you are animated by the
love of science and your kind, one truth, thus brought to
light, is in itself a victory and crown. If you are yearning
in your souls for praise, you hear its voice made musical by
gratitude. If you desire to be remembered when your dust
is as that of the Pharaohs, you have written your names upon
a tablet as imperishable as their pyramids. Think you that
the name of Harvey will die while men's hearts beat — or the
theology of murdered Servetus live as long as his explorations
of nature? No, Gentlemen, your profession has this in it,
that its progress goes step by step with the progress of
humanity, and that every truth which it rears up by the
way-side shall stand there as a memorial forever.

You must, nevertheless, admit, I think, that Medicine has
now and then set up some things which were not altogether
truths, but which it fought for quite as earnestly as if they
were. In this, I grant it only shares the common weakness
of all faiths and of all sciences. King Saladin was quite as
true a knight as Richard, and struck for Paynimrie as
bravely, and almost as cruelly, as did the Lion-hearted for
the Cross. The learned philosophers who ascertained that
nature had no fancy for a vacuum, were quite as proud of
knowing her likes and dislikes, as others were, who followed
them, of teaching she had neither. So when leech-craft
8

58 VALEDICTORY.

anointed the dagger, instead of the wound, it was at least
as well satisfied with itself as when it first used chloroform.
John Aubrey, who was a Fellow of the Royal Society,
doubtless published his recipe for curing an ague by wear-
ing a "spell" around the neck, with as honest and fine a
dogmatism, as a member of the Faculty, fifty years ago,
could have blended with the praises of calomel and bark.
Your reading has disclosed to you the rise, establishment and
tyranny of countless scientific dynasties, which turned out
to be lines of only pasteboard kings at last. The bones of
theories, once honored, now forgotten or disgraced,

" Unburied remain,
Inglorious on the plain,"

over which Medicine has marched to where it is. I bring these
things before you because they should — as with enlightened
men of course they theoretically do — suggest that manly open-
ing of the mind to fresh ideas, that ready audience to novel
thoughts, which do not always practically go with scientific
eminence. Hard as it is to learn, it seems still harder to
unlearn ; and even men whose intellectual habits verge on
rashness, will sometimes shrink, affrighted, from the innova-
tion which assails their own accepted fallacies.

I remember to have heard an admirable lecture delivered,
on the opening of the session of 1833, in the hall of your
own University, by Professor Dunglison, one of the many
eminent and world-known men who have adorned its annals.
At the close of the same session I listened to the address pro-
nounced, at the annual commencement, by the same eloquent
and learned gentleman. They were both printed, and I have

VALEDICTORY. 59

preserved them both. Their genial author, I rejoice to learn,
still lives, but in the list of the graduating class, which is
attached to them, among names now known and honored in
your profession, I see those of many — some of them my per-
sonal acquaintances — who have long passed

"To where, beyond these voices, there is peace."

The period which has intervened, though not a short one in
the life-time of a man, is brief indeed in the annals of a science ;
and in reviewing those scarcely remembered but delightful
papers, I could not help smiling at the fact that the writer,
versed as he was in all the learning of his day, should so soon
be proved to have illustrated, in them, the fulness and the
vanity of science. One lecture was a curious record of the
follies and superstitions of medical history. Contrasting
with them, in a few general phrases, the wonders of the new
philosophy, it concluded with the triumphant question — can
limits be set to the intellect of man? The other, filling up
the outlines of the first, developed at some length the leading
discoveries and methods by which modern Medicine was
speeding toward its destiny. And then, as if to check the
too audacious march of speculation, the lecturer besought his
hearers to avoid adopting, as "science in earnest/' what he
called the " vagaries " of the transcendental anatomists, whose
eccentricities he styled " philosophy in sport." Especially, he
warned their " sober minds " against the theories of the great
zoologist Lamarck, concerning the variations of organs and
of species. He spoke of those opinions as " fantastic and in
some respects revolting," and wild as the dreams of Monboddo
and Rousseau ! To those who are familiar — and what edu-

60 VALEDICTORY.

cated man is not to some extent acquainted? — with what
Darwin writes, and more than half the scientific world
accepts, as to the origin of species and their transmutation,
how strange appears to-day, this holy horror of Lamarck's
original, bold thought ! Not strange, because it shows how
theories which terrified the timid good and wise, glide harm-
lessly, at last, into the rudiments of science; but strange,
indeed, as showing how an able and progressive teacher,
fresh from a study and exposure of the errors and failures
of the past, could yet be blind to his own lessons, and
feel and think, in spite of them, as if the era of fallibility
had passed. But so it is with all of us. We fill our
lockers with the charts of other men's shipwrecks, and yet
are stranded in shallows of our own, which we take to be
the bottom of the sea.

It is told of the Caliph Vathek, that when, standing on
the summit of his magic tower, he saw the mountains far
below, like little shells, and the cities no larger than bee-
hives, at his feet, he would straightway have adored himself,
had he not beheld the planets rolling at their old immeasura-
ble height, above him. He was a seeker after knowledge
only that it might feed his vanity ; and his craving to unveil
the Infinite was but the impious lust of his pride. He did
not therefore sink under the sense of his own littleness, but
rather took consolation from reflecting that at least the men
beneath him would believe him great. We will hope that
the race of such philosophers has departed with the genii.
Happily for you, Gentlemen, the world is fast ridding itself
of the stupendous folly which so long proclaimed divorce
between the researches of science and the worship of God.

VALEDICTORY. 61

It was indeed a strange, irreverent thought — no matter from
what honest reverence it sprang — that the study of the laws
which order and inform the works of the Creator could stiffen
the knees of the creatures to whose wonder it disclosed them.
I remember — it was but a little while ago — the shock which
seemed to paralyze the public sense, when his theory of physi-
cal development was promulgated by the author of the Vestiges
of Creation. Devout, wise men appeared to feel that it assailed
the attributes of Providence, to seek the germ of all the
growth and changes of the universe in one great seed, that
grew and fructified until it filled the void of chaos. But
piety, which only shuddered at the outset, began, at last, to
think, and thinking, it discovered that perhaps the theory
which traced the universal plan, through all the ages, back
to one simple, grand expression of God's will, was not the
meanest, though it might be an erroneous conception of His
wisdom or His power. Dread not in your profession, then,
I pray you, to doubt, to test, to scrutinize, to judge. The
honest, manly exercise of faculties is truest gratitude to Him
who gave them. Responsibility of course belongs to their
misuse, but rests as heavily on him who will not or who
dares not use them. Truth only comes from seeking. Being
divine, it has no dread of questioning. What is to be, must
often rise upon the ruins of what is ; and reverence but plays
the part of superstition, when it teaches us to worship false-
hood rather than lay rude hands upon its mask.

No one knows better, Gentlemen, than I, how poorly these
mere commonplaces stand instead of what you might have
heard to-day. Thrown hastily together, in weary and brief
intervals of labor, they scarcely half express even my cordial,

62 VALEDICTORY.

earnest wishes for your welfare. Should they but lead you —
higher thoughts apart — to estimate the real value, in the toil-
some life before you, of manly self-respect and mental integrity
and independence, you will not think so ill, I hope, hereafter,
of their simple homely counsels.

And now I bid you, in the name of these your friends and
teachers, a welcome to the noble duties you have undertaken,
and a God-speed in your efforts to discharge them. They
could not speak to you, as I can, of the bright example they
have set you, nor call on you to win the honors they have
won. But cherishing, as you will cherish, the Alma Mater
with whose laurels you are crowned ; loving her fame as part
of yours, and adding yours in turn to hers; you will not
soon forget, I am persuaded, the honored, kindly hands whose
impulse sends you forth. Life is not always like a Roman
city, to reach whose gates the traveller passed through a street
of tombs ; nay, to be local in our similes, it is not even like
our Druid Hill, where we must seek the fountains and the
pleasure-houses far down a ghastly avenue of urns. As you
begin its journey joyously — think gladly also, sometimes, of
the friends who cheer you on your way.

DISCOURSE

ON THE

LIFE AND CHARACTER

OP

GEORGE FEA.BODY,

DELIVERED IN

THE HALL OF THE PEABODY INSTITUTE,

Baltimore, February 18, 1870,

AND KEPEATED, FEBRUABY 25-TH, BEFORE THE

SENATE AND HOUSE OF DELEGATES OF MARYLAND,

ON THEIR INVITATION.

GEORGE PEABODY.

ON the 12th of February, thirteen years ago, the Founder
of this Institute committed to the hands of his selected
agents the noble gift, which, under his accumulating bounty,
has since swollen to more than four times its original amount.
Upon the same day, year after year, the Trustees whom he so
honored have been wont to render him an account of their
stewardship, and renew to him the expression of their reverent
affection and gratitude. Some months after our last annual
address to him, we shared with our fellow-citizens the pleasure
of seeing him again among us in person, full, not only of
increasing sympathy with the purposes of this Foundation,
but of abounding munificence to serve them. Although the
hand of disease was then heavy upon him, there was, we
thought, reason for the hope that he might be spared for
many years, to see the growth of the good seed which he had
planted in so many places. We especially looked forward to
the return of our anniversary, that we might testify, by some
public and appropriate recognition, our sense of his untiring
bounty and his cordial personal confidence and kindness.
But — blessed as his work on earth was, it had been accom-
plished, and a higher reward was near him than even an old
9 65

66 GEORGE PEABODY.

age, beloved of God and man. We shall never look upon
his kindly face again, nor shall his lips speak charity and
wisdom, any more, to us. The thousands of little children
who were gathered round him, as about a father's knees, when
he graced the dedication of this building with his presence,
will tell to their own children how the eyes of the good
man filled and his kind voice faltered, as he uttered the last
touching and tender words of counsel, which were among his
worthiest gifts to them. But his venerable form they must
remember, now, among the pleasant visions of childhood,
which fleeted away too soon. He is of the past, to them as
to us; and though public sorrow and private affection may
mourn over his departure, there is surely no one to repine at
the thought, that he has passed over the great gulf, fixed, of
old time, between the rich man and Abraham's bosom.

I am here, upon the invitation of my associates in the
Trust which Mr. Peabody created in Baltimore, to say some-
thing of his life and character. We had selected, as an appro-
priate occasion, the anniversary to which I have alluded. The
change which brings us together to-day, instead, not only
gives us the pleasure of welcoming friends and co-laborers
from a distance, who could not otherwise have joined us in
these offices, but enables us, " with double pomp of sadness,"
on the birth-day of our Founder, to lay our tribute on his
tomb. I regret, unaffectedly, that the duty which has been
assigned to me was not committed, as I wished, to other hands,
for there are those among my brethren, far better fitted to
perform it, whose age and long and intimate acquaintance
with Mr. Peabody would have given to eulogy the weight
and the force of personal knowledge and testimony. Except,

GEORGE PEABODY. 67

however, as an expression of our own and the public feeling
and the doing of a duty as well as a labor of love, it would
seem almost idle for the best of us to say a word at this
moment. The press of the civilized world has already
exhausted on the subject all the acuteness of analysis and
all the fulness of appreciation and sympathy. Eloquence
has poured out upon it the whole wealth of pathos and
illustration. Even governments have found heart in it for
tenderness and reverence, and

"Nations swell the funeral cry."

In the annals of our race, there is no record of funeral
honors, to an uncrowned man, such as have been rendered
to George Peabody. The story which comes nearest to what
we have beheld, is told by the grandest historian of Rome
and is lighted by the finest touches of his genius. It follows
the widow of Germanicus across the wintry seas, as she
bore, from Antioch to Rome, the ashes of her hero. We
can almost see the people crowding to the walls and house-
tops, and thronging the sea-coast, as with slow oars the silent
galleys came. The voice of lamentation seems to echo round
us, as it rose from all the multitude, when Agrippina landed
with her precious burden, and her sobbing children followed.
The urn is borne to the Imperial City on the shoulders of
centurions and tribunes. Crowds hasten from afar and weep,
in mourning garments, by the road-sides. Funereal altars
smoke with victims as the sad array goes by, and spices and
perfumes and costly raiment are flung into the flames as
offerings. The City streets — now still as death, now loud
with bursting sorrow — are thronged with Rome's whole peo-

68 GEORGE PEABODY.

pie, and when, at last, the ashes are at rest in the Augustan
Mausoleum, a wail goes up, such as before had never swept
along those marble ways. The tale which Tacitus has told
us of these splendid obsequies, comes to us, with redoubled
grandeur, through " the corridors of time," and yet its inci-
dents are almost tame to what ourselves have witnessed.
The stately ship which bore, across the waves, the corpse of
him we honor, is a marvel that Kome never dreamed of— the
proudest convoy that ever guarded human ashes. The ocean
which she traversed is an empire, over which the eagles of
Germanicus knew no dominion. The mighty engines and
instruments of war which welcomed her, were far beyond
the prophecy of oracle or thought of Sibyl. Beside the
unseen power which dragged the funeral-car and cleft the
waters with its burden, in mastery of the winds, the might
of legions is simple insignificance, and it seems like trifling
to tell of galleys, centurions and tribunes. Nor is there, in
the mourning of the populace of Kome over one of its
broken idols, a type even of the noble sorrow which has
united men of all nations and opinions in their tribute to
our lamented dead. And who shall speak of Heathen tem-
ple or Imperial tomb, in the same breath with the great
Abbey Minster, where he slept awhile amid the monuments
and memories of statesmen and warriors, philosophers and
poets, philanthropists and kings — where more of the dust of
what was genius and greatness is gathered, than ever lay
under roof or stone? There is something which almost
bewilders the imagination, in the thought, that on the day
and at the hour when our own bells were tolling his death-
knell and people stopped to listen, in the streets, the requiem

GEORGE PEABODY. 6

of the Danvers boy was pealing through aisle and cloister,
thousands of miles away, where funeral song had rung and
censers smoked, whole centuries before men knew the Conti-
nent which was his birthplace. It seems as if the dirge of
to-day were a reverberation from the ages. And when we
reflect how simple the career was, which closed amid all these
honors; how little their subject had to do with the things
which commonly stir men's bosoms and win the shouts of
wonder and applause, in life or after it; that he was not
great, as men judge greatness ; that every badge and trophy
of his exceeding triumph was won by an unconscious and an
unstained hand : I confess it seems to me that the grand, spon-
taneous tributes which have been paid to him, have beggared
the resources, while they have filled the measure, of panegyric.
We are not required to forget, nor do we disparage the
living or the dead by remembering, that something of this
may be due to the peculiar relations existing, at the moment,
between the countries which divided Mr. Peabody's bounty
and affections. A becoming spirit of manly conciliation, on
the one side, and an equally becoming temper and pride of
nationality, upon the other, have no doubt had their share
in these unprecedented demonstrations. But there is noth-
ing in this which detracts from the sincerity or impairs
the significance of the homage that either has rendered. It
is a new epoch in the history of governments, when the cavils
of diplomacy and the mutterings of discord are hushed, even
for an hour, by the spell of a good man's memory ; and it
were folly to dispute his place among his kind, whose death
so touched the hearts of two great nations, that either could
call unto the other to join hands with it across his grave.

70 GEORGE PEABODY.

But while these things, as I have said, appear to render
eulogy idle, they are equally potent, in making just apprecia-
tion difficult. Through so much that dazzles, it is not easy
to look, steadily and calmly, at the simple life and story
which had so bright an ending. The quiet, systematic
habits, the delving industry, the thrifty shrewdness and
world-wisdom, the unsentimental benevolence, of the plain,
practical merchant and banker who walked among us, like
others in his calling, are hard to deal with, fairly, at this
epic stage of his renown. It seems like belittling the subject
to consider it in the mere light of its realities. Indeed it
requires an effort, at such a time, for the coldest thinker to
divest himself of that enthusiasm whose natural expression
is extravagance ; and nothing but a sense of the great wrong
which exaggeration would do to a memory so far above it,
could persuade a man of ordinary impulse that it is proper to
moderate his words. Nor is it only the contagion of the hour
of homage which it is difficult to escape. There is something
splendid and attractive in generosity, in all its forms; and
when its scope embraces the larger needs of humanity, and
its resources are almost as ample as its scope, it carries feeling
and imagination away captive. We surround the life and the
memory of the " cheerful giver " with a halo such as glitters
only around consecrated heads. The wonder of the crowd is
almost worship ; and men deem it half a sacrilege to seek, in
merely human qualities, "the conjuration and the mighty
magic " which seem so far beyond humanity. And yet, to do
this only is our duty here to-day. We have come to recog-
nize and study, in the common light, the traits of the man
and citizen, George Peabody; to consider and teach, if we

GEORGE PEABODY. 71

can, the moral of his simple, unheroic life. We are to look
at him, as he moved and had his daily being, — as if his
features did not live in bronze and no minute-gun had ever
told his burial to the sea. Nay, it is our business to take
from the record of his career all that tends to impair and
falsify its lesson, by making men despair of rising to his
level. Here, above all other places; with the sound of his
own sturdy teachings scarce dull upon our ears; with his
simplicity and modesty — his good fellowship and plain deal-
ing— fresh in our remembrance and affection ; with all things
round about us full of what he was and of all he claimed or
cared to be ; we should insult his memory by attempting to
add an inch to his stature. And indeed there is small need
of fancy in dealing with his story, for scarce anything in
fiction is more strange than the actual prose of it. The
child of poor parents and humble hopes — a grocer's boy at
eleven, the assistant of a country shop-keeper at sixteen — he
had reached but middle-life when he was able so to deal
with the resources of the great money-centre of the world,
as to prop, with his integrity and credit, the financial deca-
dence of whole commonwealths. Pausing even at that point
of his career — a period to which in Maryland our gratitude
so frequently recurs — is it not more wonderful than the
legend which delighted our childhood, the tale of Whit-
tington, citizen and mercer, thrice Lord Mayor of London?
Was it not quite as easy, beforehand, for our stripling to
imagine that he heard, across the waters, an invitation from
Bow Bells to him, as to conceive that his statue would be
raised in London streets while yet he lived, and be unveiled,
with words of reverence and honor, by the heir-apparent of

72 GEORGE PEABODY.

that mighty empire, surrounded by its best and noblest?
Add to this what I have before described, and it seems as if
another night had been added to the Thousand and One.

But, as I have said, our business is not with the wonders.
It is with the mind, the heart, the will, the character which
wrought them. These were the only genii of this story.
They, and they only, did wliat was done, and neither ring
nor lamp had any part in it. " No man," Carlyle tells us,
" becomes a saint in his sleep ; " and there is no greater fallacy
than the popular notion which so often attributes success,
in great things, to luck. There are people, it is true, who
stumble into prosperity and get place and power, by what,
to mortal eye, seems chance. Reputation and the honors and
profits which follow it are now and then wafted to a man,
like thistle-down, for no better visible reason than that he
happens to be out in the same wind with them. The crowd
attach themselves often, and cling with devotion, to some
singularly favored person, as burrs do to his clothing, simply,
as it would appear, because he walks among them. But what
seems does not necessarily represent what is; and a man must
be hard to convince, if, after having used a microscope once,
he be not satisfied for life, that things exist and are com-
prehensible though he may neither see nor understand them
himself. What therefore may appear to be exceptions to the
general truth, that great results do not spring from insufficient
causes, are commonly found to be strictly within it. In the
course of any long life-time, the logic of cause and effect is
apt to vindicate itself. In this busy, stirring, jostling, inter-
ested modern society of ours, where scarcely any one occupies
a pedestal-— or even an humbler place — but some one else goes

GEORGE PEABODY. 73

anxiously to work to dislodge him and get there in his stead,
we seldom find respect or deference, love or admiration, long
yielded to a brother, unless there be that in him which com-
mands them. The world may dally with its impostors and
its charlatans — its trumpery great men, sham heroes and mock
saints and sages — for a little while, but they finally go down,
for the most part, into the receptacle — the huge Noah's Ark —
of its spurned and worthless playthings. The winds of time
and contest blow away the chaff, at last, from the great grain-
floor of humanity — a blessed fact, by the by, which reconciles
us to many tempests. Hemisphere does not cry aloud to
hemisphere about common people. Nations do not mourn
over men who deserve no tears. There was then something
in George Peabody, or about him, that called for the homage
which has been rendered him. What was it?

Not his intellect, certainly — for neither in capacity nor
cultivation was he above the grade of thousands of clever
men, both here and in England, in his own and kindred
callings. He had not genius to dazzle, or invention to create.
He had made no discovery in science, or even in finance. He
knew little of art, and had contributed nothing to the stock
of what is denominated " human knowledge." Statesman he
was not — nay, not even politician. He had never worn spur
on battle-field : had never filled office, or wielded power, or
sought to be any man's master but his own. There was not,
I repeat, a single element in him or circumstance in his career,
of those which enter into the common estimate of greatness.
Neither did riches win his name for him. He was no
monopolist, no miracle, of wealth : for enormous private for-
tunes are now constantly acquired, in half such a life-time as
10

74 GEORGE PEABODY.

his, and the great marts of the world have men far richer
than he, whose accumulations have been gathered just as
honestly, just as fortunately, and with quite as much sagacity
as his. Nor does he stand alone in the appropriation of large
means to the good of mankind. The number of rich men
whose testaments dispense the hoards of a life-time in works
of usefulness, is very large. The past has left us many well-
known and abiding monuments of such beneficence. True,
there is a smack of death-bed repentance, as well as bounty,
in these gifts; a confession, at best, of intentions good but
reluctant and long smothered by human infirmity. We cannot
help feeling that they sometimes are very much, in kind and
motive, like the obolus which used to be placed between the lips
of the dead, to pay for their safe ferrying across the infernal
waters. But still, they clothe the naked, feed the hungry,
comfort the sick, educate the poor — relieve, in all sorts of
ways, the necessities and afflictions of humanity — and those
who dispense them deserve well of their race. Though the
good works which "blossom in their dust," might have
yielded more fragrance under the culture of their hands,
they are good works notwithstanding, and should be remem-
bered with charity not less than gratitude — as they commonly
are. But the liberality of rich men is not always posthumous ;
and in the mere fact of giving and giving largely, in his life-
time, Mr. Peabody was by no means singular. The world is
full, I was going to say — though that perhaps is stating the
case too strongly — of people who habitually give. They cer-
tainly are no rarity in it. Most of us give freely, to those
we love — to our own flesh and blood, at all events. They
who do not, belong, I think, to the class whom Burns charac-

GEORGE PEABODY. 75

terizes as, " the real hardened wicked/' and it is wholesome to
persuade ourselves that they are likewise " to a few restricked."
When Thackeray says, somewhere, that he never saw a fine
boy, but he felt like giving him a guinea, he does not, I am
sure, exaggerate the natural impulse of every healthy and
manly heart. There are many to whom this sort of impulse
is a general, spontaneous, and often fatal rule of life. Some
indeed — and a large class — give because they cannot help it.
Giving, with them, is almost a pleasure of sense. It is the
natural expression of a feeling, as weeping and sighing are
with others. It is at once the voice and the tear of their
sympathy. The heart sends its quickened pulsation directly
to the hand, which only fetters could keep from the purse-
strings. And this, too frequently, without check of prudence,
or choice of object, or thought of to-morrow. We are apt
to admire and indeed to love these people ; for, to the com-
mon apprehension, the pleasure and advantage of keeping
money are so striking, that to part with it, freely, passes for
a sacrifice. And yet, obviously, they may be just as self-
indulgent, in their way, as their next-door neighbor, whose
heart is always in his burglar-proof safe and his hand never,
except to increase or count his store. It may be their pleasure
to scatter, as it is his to save; and they may consult noth-
ing better than their pleasure, as he pursues nothing better
than his. Sir Thomas Browne calls their's " but moral
charity, and an act that oweth more to passion than reason."
And he adds, in the same strain, that "He who relieves
another, upon the bare suggestion and bowels of pity, doth
not this so much for his sake, as for his own ; for by compas-
sion we make other's misery our own, and so by relieving

76 GEORGE PEASODY.

them we relieve ourselves also." Happily, the common heart
is not quite so ingenious or so analytical as this; but contents
itself with feeling, that though the bountiful and the miser
may be selfish, in their several ways, the one selfishness is still
a better thing than the other. Indeed there is almost always
something, in these heedless natures, which redeems the sin of
their improvidence and self-indulgence ; and although, when
waste makes want, they have often to eat husks in sorrow,
and wait on those who are to them but swine, we cannot help
thinking, sometimes, that they belong to that class of prodigals
for whom a fatted calf will be killed, one day, when they
will eat and drink, and be as merry as the hundreds they
have fed in their time. To this kind of givers, our experience
must add that other and familiar class, who part with money
readily, because they are incapacitated, by nature, from feeling
its value. I say feeling — because the processes of the heart
are so much quicker than those of the head, that it profits a
man very little, in these matters, only to understand and
know. The battle is generally lost, in such case, before the
reserves come up. But how many people, especially women,
are we not acquainted with — every one of us here, — whose
whole existence is a mission of beneficence; who know and
feel the worth of money, and yet spend it on others without
stint ; with whom the poor, as Be"ranger has it, are harvesters,
not gleaners ; whose hands are as open as the prodigal's and
yet never waste ; in whom the love of giving is so chastened
by the love of the Great Giver, that they dispense their
bounty as His alms, and make of charity a very worship?
These however are the silent and humble Samaritans of the
highways and by-ways, who, for the most part, are only fol-

GEORGE PEABODY. 77

lowed by individual gratitude or personal affection. They do
not amass fortunes, or make testaments, or have statues erected
to them. The great world knows little about them and, as a
whole, cares little ; for though they are no trifling element in
its economy, they seem so, to the thoughtless, in the broad
scope of an economy so large.

If I am right then in supposing that the secret of Mr.
Peabody's fame is not to be found in the mere fact of his
having given, and given freely, in his life-time, to good
objects, where else are we to look for it ? Not, surely, in the
magnitude of his benefactions. It were shame to judge him
by a standard so vulgar and unworthy. It would not only
be to scandalize his memory, but to throw away the whole
moral and lesson of his life. The homage which is rendered
to the givers of great gifts, merely because their gifts are
great, is but parcel of that deification and worship of wealth,
which is the opprobrium of our times. When this comes in the
shape of a tribute to the dead, it is, of course, comparatively
free from the personal servility, the self-abasing deference, the
mean genuflections, which pay court to the living rich. But
it is the same ignoble thing, in its motive and essence, though
the sables be wrapped around it, and what men knelt to before
may have become as the dust in which they knelt. And just
as royalty succeeding is studious and exigent of pomp and
splendor, in the obsequies of royalty dead, so, and for the
same reason, wealth surviving exaggerates the dignity of
wealth departed ; and those who adore and would propitiate
the one, crowd to canonize and glorify the other. To deal in
such a spirit with the man whose birth-day we commemorate,
would be to degrade ourselves and crush him, basely, like

78 GEORGE PEABODY.

Tarpeia, with the weight of his own gold. It is the very
fact that a million more or a million less would have counted
but as a farthing, either way, in the just estimate of his pur-
poses and character, which makes the rare nobility and worth
of his example. Without the millions we might perhaps
have had less of the pageant, but we should have had none
the less of the man. Eleven years ago, it came within the
province of the present speaker, on a public and interesting
occasion, to illustrate the theme before him by an allusion to
Mr. Peabody, who had then taken but the earliest steps in the
career of his open beneficence. You will pardon, I hope, the
repetition of what was then said, because it puts in a few
words precisely the idea which I desire, at this moment, to
express ; and having been written in advance of the later and
more famous charities of our Founder, it will show that those
who knew and respected him, then, esteemed the source from
which his good deeds sprang, far more for itself than for its
fruits. The language then used, was the following :

" When I see a man like George Peabody — a man of plain
intellect and moderate education — who is willing to take away
from the acquisitions of successful trade, what would make
the fortunes of a hundred men of reasonable desires, and
dedicate it to the advancement of knowledge and the cultiva-
tion of refining and liberal pursuits and tastes, among a
people with whom he has ceased to dwell, except in the recol-
lections of early industry and struggle — I recognize a spirit
which tends to make men satisfied with the inequalities of
fortune — which is alive to the true ends and purposes of
labor — which gives as well as takes — which sees, in the very
trophies of success, the high incumbent duties and the noble

GEORQE PEABODT. 79

pleasure of a stewardship for others. And yet, one such
man — in himself — in his life and the example which it gives —
is worth tenfold more to a community, than all the beneficence
of which his heart may make him prodigal."

Feeling and believing this, I should be false to my own
conception of the honorable duty assigned to me, if I did not
protest against regarding what is called the " princeliness " of
Mr. Peabody's munificence, as other than an element entirely
subordinate, in any just and manly appreciation of his charac-
ter. And indeed, after all, I must own that the large bounty
of ordinary rich men does not impress me, always, as it seems
to strike many others. Liberality is a relative thing; and,
obviously, what is generous and whole-souled in one person,
viewed in its relation to his means and his own wants, may,
in the same relation, be niggardly or narrow in another. The
good that giving does may be the test of its value, but certainly
is not of its merit. That is best determined, humanly speak-
ing, by what it costs the giver to give. I do not mean what it
ought not to cost — the agony which miserly reluctance suffers,
in parting with a fragment of its hoard, under the torture of
entreaty or the dread of shame or death ; but that cheerful,
conscious and deliberate self-sacrifice, which renders the mite
of the widow more precious, a thousand fold, than the gold
and frankincense and myrrh of the Magi. I speak of self-
sacrifice, for (with a single and melancholy qualification which
I shall presently consider) it is hard to understand how there
can be much merit in the simple act of giving to others what
we do not ourselves need. On the contrary, it is difficult to
conceive what greater pleasure a rich man could possibly have
in his wealth, than that of pouring out its superabundance in

80 GEORGE PEABODY.

works of kindliness and charity. It is not meant by this to
set up a very high standard. I am not talking of disciples,
who are to part with all that they possess and follow their
Master. It is not a question of surrendering one single rea-
sonable, or even luxurious, personal gratification. I speak
of superabundance merely — of that which is over and above
what the owner, in any reasonable way, can expend upon
himself, his comforts, his tastes, his luxuries, nay, if you
please, the vices of his station. But — all these things reserved
and cared for — and treating the disposition of the surplus as
a selfish gratification merely, and as nothing higher or better,
it seems, I repeat, incomprehensible to a genial — I need not
say a generous — nature, that a man can possibly get greater
happiness out of it than must come from dispensing it in
kindness. Gonzalo De C6rdova, of Spain, the Great Captain,
was one of those who held this faith. "Never stint your
hand" — he said to his steward — "there is no mode of enjoying
one's property like giving it away." It is true the illustrious
soldier may have occasionally treated as his property what
did not precisely belong to him ; but his preaching was none
the worse for this, because his practice with his own came
nobly up to it. Going a little more deeply too into the vanities
as well as the virtues which this discussion involves, Lord
Lytton says, with great point, in one of his more serious
works, that "Charity is a feeling dear to the pride of the
human heart. It is an aristocratic emotion . . . the easiest
virtue to practice." There is no doubt that in the sense in
which he speaks of charity, the observation is as just as it is
clever. If a rich man covets respect and influence ; if he
desires to attract sympathy and hear himself praised ; to be

GEORGE PEABODT. 81

looked up to, flattered, followed and caressed in life, and have
an epitaph, after it, like a player's good report — deserving
none of these things, the while — there is no cheaper or more
certain means of securing them all, than a few judicious invest-
ments of his abundance in what ought to be charity. When he
purchases, at the same time, by the same outlay, the pleasure
of doing good and the incense of gratitude, one cannot feel
that the cross which he has taken up is a very heavy one,
or that he walks upon celestial heights above the hearts of
common men.

If I am right then, in assuming that the lesson of our
Founder's life lies not in that he gave, or gave before he died,
or gave superbly — nor, indeed in all these things combined —
what is there left that teaches it ? We must turn back upon
the life itself, to give us answer.

Mr. Peabody was not a man of gushing sensibilities, nor
did he belong, in any sense, to that class who are free with
money because they do not know or feel its value. Indeed
there were few of his contemporaries, in whom this latter
element of generosity was less developed. He knew all about
money, and valued it at its full, current worth. He knew it,
as a man knows a friend and ought to know an enemy. That
his nature was genuinely kind, all who were near him would
have known — as well as they know it now — if he had died a
bankrupt. His face, alone, told that part of his story, for
his smile was of the sort men cannot counterfeit —

"His eyes,

An outdoor sign of all the good within,
Smiled with his lips."

11

82 GEORGE PEABODY.

But his sympathies, nevertheless, were not coined, at sight
of need, into money. He began life with none of it to give,
or even to keep. He was very poor. What he gained, he
toiled for, and it came painfully and slowly. He said the
prayer for his daily bread, as we are told none but a poor
man's child 'can say it, and he was willing to do anything
honest and manly to turn the penny that he needed. Even
after he had been established for some time in the District of
Columbia, and his prospects had very much improved, I learn
from a venerable friend, Mr. Peabody's senior (whose memory,
like the rest of his fine faculties, appears only to brighten
with age), that he offered to forward packages to Baltimore,
and appealed to the public for their patronage. As he had
no capital, his enterprise could have been but a small one,
probably involving nothing but his personal attention ; and I
allude to it, merely to show that he was not only content, at
that time, but anxious, to earn small sums in a small way.
Naturally too, he was no doubt equally disposed to keep what
he earned. Overboard at sea and compelled to sink or swim,
it was not strange that he should feel the importance of making
his own raft sea-worthy, before he pushed away a plank that
he could hold. Besides, he was eminently a man of thrift.
He came into the world with it, and he drew it in from the
atmosphere into which he was born. He liked to make, and
to save, and to increase his store, and he liked the store itself,
after it was increased — the more the better. Money-making
was a pleasure to him, as well as an instinct of his nature.
Clearly, these circumstances were not favorable to the develop-
ment, in him, of Gonzalo De Cordova's doctrine. He was a
man of the busiest industry too, and had no fancy for drones —

QEORGE PEAEODY. 83

thinking possibly, as we are all apt to think, when prosperous,
or when health and energy and strength are bounding in us,
that no man need want who will work. Besides, he was full
of system and fond of detail, two mighty curbs upon the
imagination. Under all these influences he pursued, as he
began, a saving, painstaking, careful life, and when he had
become rich, these characteristics had grown with his fortune.
His case was precisely the reverse of that described in the
Castilian proverb, which says — " The money of the Sacristan
comes singing and goes singing." His habits therefore con-
tinued, as they always had been, simple and frugal. His
desires had not grown with his ability to indulge them, nor
had his tastes. Neither had the pride of purse entered, with
its seven other devils, into his robust and downright nature.
He was the same man that he had always been — only richer.
And when still greater wealth came to him, by the rapid
processes of speculation, it had no power to dazzle him or
make him giddy. He looked after it, invested it carefully
and closely, increased it to the best of his ability, and enjoyed,
as keenly as his fellows, the pleasure which these processes
always bring to men who deal in money, and have that knack
of handling it to profit, which is born in some, like poetry,
but cannot be learned. Nor was he at all ashamed, so long
as he remained in business, to promote its success by all
honorable means. On the contrary, he took pains to do this.
He was glad to make friends, and to see them grow into
customers. He was as thrifty, in fine — as decided and con-
stant in his business-purposes, and as close and systematic in
promoting them — after he had become a great financial power,
as when he ate his bread in the sweat of his face. Now and

84 GEORGE PEASODY.

then he seemed to forget all this. It were more accurate, to
say that he pushed it aside, in the presence of higher con-
siderations. When his patriotism or his national pride was
touched, he did not let it stand for a moment in the way of
his remembering and doing what became him, with a largeness
of purpose and freedom of hand which showed that the man-
hood of his nature was still fresh and true. He threw into
his labors for the restoration of the credit of Maryland, his
soul as well as his fortune, and refused any compensation but
the pleasure and the pride of the great good which he had
assisted in consummating. He stood in the stead of his whole
country, to save her from the shame of official neglect and
meanness, when the Great Exhibition assembled the nations
together. He speeded the brave enterprise of Kane on its
mission of science and humanity, with a liberality and in a
spirit of which there is reason to believe the whole story has
never been told. Yet, all the while, he, himself, remained as
of old, modest, moderate, economical and thrifty — living in
lodgings, without retinue or luxury — not unwilling to save
a farthing, if it came in his way — willing to go out of his
way rather than waste or even lose one. He would still have
his bargain, about the small thing as well as the great ; and he
would make men stand to their bargains and give him, in the
way of business, the fraction that belonged to him. Imposi-
tion he resented and resisted, no matter how minute its form,
and he would protect himself from it, if he had to cavil for
his ninth part of a hair. A friend who knew him well and
had his confidence, has told me, that one day, in London,
after an interview in which they had discussed together his
latest and most bounteous charities — when he was dispensing

GEORGE PEABODY. 85

millions with a stroke of his pen, — Mr. Peabody refused to
take a cab, and insisted on walking, because the cabman they
had called wanted more than his lawful fare. Thus, beneath
the surface of his munificence, his large public sympathies,
his generous patriotism, flowed on the old current of thrift,
economy, closeness and money-loving. Perhaps, rather, the
two streams ran side by side in the same bed, like the united
waters of the Arve and Rhone — one earthy and bearing the
stain of the earth, the other bright with the hue of the sky.
But there came a time, at last, when this busy, accumu-
lating life, with its seemingly inconsistent traits and phases,
was to be rounded into its final development and true expres-
sion. The elements of character which appeared so much in
contrast with each other as scarcely to be reconciled, were to
be shown working all the while harmoniously together. The
man of calculation and acquisition — almost of greed, if you
please — with all the habits and temptations which are com-
monly inseparable from the career of such, was of a sudden
to rise up superior to them all, as if he had never known
them — a head and shoulders higher than his seeming self.
The man whose practical life had been mainly dedicated to
saving, was to consecrate the rest of it to giving. The man
who loved money and had lived in pursuit of it, was to reach
that point — almost unattainable by humanity — at which he
was to feel and say : " I have enough ! " Such phenomena
are developments, not changes. If Mr. Peabody's whole
heart had been in money during the long years when he was
" gathering gear," he could never, in his old age, have shaken
off the golden fetters. The result showed which had been
master and which servant, all the while. The fruit proved

86 GEORGE PEABODT.

the tree. And yet the fruit had in it much taste of the soil
in which the tree grew. The system, the care, the prudence,
which had gathered and preserved his wealth, were developed
as well in its appropriation. In fact he made benevolence
his business and dealt with it as such. Its merely sympa-
thetic guise did not seem to attract him. At all events he
did not yield greatly to its attraction. He did not grasp at
the near pleasure which comes from the contact of present
charity with present suffering. For his kindred he provided
with generosity, yet without prodigality. His aims were
wider and his sight went farther than would have been con-
sistent with bestowing his wealth on individuals, no matter
how much he prized them. He had not mounted upon a
high hill, without having his horizon expanded. He saw
humanity in the distance as well as beside him, and saw it
was the same humanity, far off as near. Yet his extended
vision rested where the mists began. It did not seek to
penetrate the realms of unreality. He was not misled by
any dream of reforming the world. The consciousness of
being able to do something for mankind, and the desire to
do all that he could, did not betray him into the folly of
supposing that he could do everything. He was as far from
being a schemer as if he had not the means of scheming. He
was not imaginative, much less fanciful. He knew that wealth
is the great lever of the world and that his hand was on it, but
he had no notion that, with it, he could change the course of
the planet. He had seen enough of what is commonly called
"philanthropy," in his generation, and had no taste for it.
Probably he had heard of Kobespierre's early philippic
against capital punishment, and knew the value of specula-

GEORGE PEABODY. 87

tive benevolence. He therefore did not lend himself or his
money to the schemes of those excellent but somewhat self-
engrossed and not very useful people, who think that society
is like Pandora's box, with its great good at the bottom, and
that the true way of getting at this, is to turn the whole
upside down. The solitary blow, as far as I have seen,
which malice has aimed at his memory, has come from a
" humanitarian " quarter — as if to demonstrate the justness of
his appreciation. Looking at human nature in the light of
his own experience, and valuing most highly in it that
healthy, vigorous, independence which was his own peculiar
trait, he thought he could help his fellow-creatures best, by
teaching them to help themselves. He likewise thought that,
on the whole, more good was to be done by striking the evils
of humanity at their root, than by providing for a few of
their victims. These were the simple principles which guided
the application of his bounty. He persuaded himself that
cleanliness, industry and thrift are preventives of disease and
poverty ; that the vices which fester in the squalid den have
no place in the decent and cheerful home — so, instead of
founding hospitals and almshouses for London vagrants and
paupers, he offered the attraction of cheap and comfortable
dwellings to those who are willing to work. He believed
that education, refining occupations, cultivated tastes, the
study and the love of art and science are, next to religion,
the great safeguards and purifiers of society, and accordingly
he founded institutes, libraries, professorships, boards of edu-
cation, to diffuse and encourage them among his countrymen.
In all this, he followed the bent of his life — investing instead
of spending. Nor did he follow the example of some founders,

88 GEORGE PEABODY.

who retain control over their foundations and deceive them-
selves into the belief that they are administering, what they
are only unable to give up the pleasure of handling. He
placed all that he gave in the hands of others — absolutely and
without reserve. It was his honest and deliberate judgment
that the best use he could make of the grain he had garnered
was to turn it into seed, not food. So he chose his ground
and planted, in the faith that future seed-time and oft-
returning harvest would vindicate his choice, under His
blessing who sends down the early and the latter rain.

Was this, it has been asked, as loving a use of his wealth,
as if he had flung it into the palms of the needy ? In one
sense, of course, it was not. In another and a loftier one,
it was far more so. If Mr. Peabody had dedicated his
fortune and remaining years to personal alms-giving, and had
sent out to the lanes and hedges for the weary and the
wretched : if he had chosen for his almoners the institutions
and associations which deal, from day to day with every-day
suffering and sorrow, he would, no doubt, have swept a softer
and a gentler chord of sympathy. We are flesh to each other,
though we be spirits before God ; and the sweet

"music, to whose tone
The common pulse of man keeps time,"

answers most tenderly the touch of a warm, human hand.
Who can have read Lamb's exquisite "Complaint of the
Decay of Beggars," without feeling that the very shifts and
impostures of poverty have all the pathos of a tribute to the
daily kindliness and goodness which walk among the poor?
With his fortune and his purposes of good, if Mr. Peabody

GEORGE PEABODY. 89

had chosen, he might have had crowds follow him, as kings
were followed when men thought their touch would heal.
And few men, with his heart, and no man, with less high
resolves than his, could have resisted so egregious a tempta-
tion. Nor, indeed, would it have been necessary he should
do so, if all men were prepared, as he was, to give according
to their means. It is the lack of such a disposition, in the
mass of us, which calls on wise benevolence to stay its hand,
and concentrate and organize its charities. If we were, to
one another, all that we are commanded and ought to be,
large fortunes would rarely be gathered and eleemosynary
foundations would be superfluous. If every man did really
look upon his neighbor as his brother, or love him as himself,
the circle of charity would belt a happy world, and every
private life would be an institution of beneficence. Why
this great scheme of Christianity is not wrought out yet, or
when it will be, we may not know. Society therefore must
deal with its problems as it finds them, and think for
to-morrow as well as for to-day. In fact, the very applica-
tion of large private wealth to present purposes of charity,
has its ill effects as well as good. There is a class of moral
and most respectable people, who pay with absolute punc-
tuality all the debts that can be recovered from them by law,
but who do not recognize, with equal alacrity, the obligation
of any others. They think they have done all that they are
called to do, in behalf of education and charity, when they
have paid the taxes levied for schools and almshouses. They
are typified by Jeremy Taylor's "man of ordinary piety,"
whom he likens to "Gideon's fleece, wet in its own locks,
but it could not water a poor man's garden." To these
12

90 QEOEGE PEABODY.

worthy citizens, the benevolence of others appears only to
come in aid of municipal contribution; and the larger its
abundance the greater the justification they find in it for
their unwillingness to give to any but the public collector,
or to give to him any more than they cannot help. Why
should they trouble themselves to take in the poor estrays
of humanity, when there is room enough for them in the
common pound which the public or some one else has pro-
vided? It is not worth while for society to shut its eyes
to these and kindred considerations, and the wise and good
who undertake to be its benefactors, must act for the world
as it is, and subordinate sentiment to prudence and duty.
They must look to the future and mankind, not less than
to the present and the individual. And it is in this sense
that their charity is the noblest of all, because it is the largest
of all in its scope. It goes even beyond the love which has
been beautifully described, as " not a spasm but a life." It
imitates, with reverence, as far as man may imitate, the work-
ings of that Supreme Beneficence, which guides by large rules
the universal plan of its goodness. Nor does it recognize the
less its relation to humanity. The human sympathy which
wins a blessing from the way-side beggar is none the less
heartfelt and human, surely, because it is expanded in pur-
pose and through time, and is directed and informed by sys-
tem and intelligence.

And here a thought presents itself, on which I cannot pause
to dwell, but which appears not altogether barren of sugges-
tion. Enormous capital is one of the phenomena — perhaps
the mightiest engine — of our civilization. Vast fortunes are
in many hands, private as well as corporate, and vastness is

GEORGE PEABODY. 91

the characteristic of all enterprises, good and bad. Side by
side with this increase in wealth and the number of those who
control it, is another phenomenon, almost as singular under
the circumstances. I mean the great and general diffusion
of competence and comfort, among the multitudes who are
not rich — among those who labor with their hands, as well
as those of more liberal pursuits. In this state of society,
and regarding, comprehensively, the interests as well as the
resources of the community at large, it is well worth consider-
ing whether the field of benevolence proper to be cultivated
by the very rich, is not precisely that which Mr. Peabody
selected, leaving the more personal and minor charities to
minor fortunes. The distribution seems a wise one, if benevo-
lence be not ashamed to learn from greed. If concentration
of capital, which is power, has been found to serve the purposes
of gain, it cannot less promote the nobler industries of loving-
kindness.

But whether the disposition which Mr. Peabody made of
his wealth was more or less genial or wise, has nothing to do
with the spirit in which he parted with it. He dedicated it
to ends which he honestly thought good. He directed it
wisely, according to his best wisdom. Whether he was right,
or was mistaken, in his modes or his ends, his riches at all
events went away from himself. In the ripe maturity of a
yet vigorous life and the unembarrassed control of a colossal
fortune ; at an age when the love of money is apt to seize
upon those who have loved it least, and becomes the very
existence of those who have always loved it ; when, if men
pause from struggling, it is to enjoy in tranquility the fruits
of struggle; honored, respected, with every avenue accessible

92 GEORGE PEABODY.

to his ambition which popularity could open and every prize
at his command which wealth could buy — (and what can it
not buy ?) — he deliberately converted his remaining years into
a season of stewardship and surrendered himself to his kind.
In the simple and touching language of the epitaph which
commemorates the founder of the Charity Hospital at Seville :
"He gave to them whatever he had." There is no record,
that I know, of any man who, in like case, did likewise.
Monarchs, it is true, have abdicated thrones, in the fulness
of power. But, for the most part, it was a retirement from
self in one form, into self in another. Satiety of pomp and
pleasure — repentance of misdeeds — a weariness of strife and
longing for repose — made them fling down their sceptres in
the reaction of despair. The jaded soul yearned for deliver-
ance and rushed into the shades for refuge. Those who have
followed Charles into the cloisters of Yuste, will remember
how the phantoms of empire still haunted the devotee at the
altar. But the love of money is more absorbing and more
abiding than even the love of power. Avarice may not
always be a worse passion than ambition, but it is a lower
one. Its poison may not be the deadliest to the moral nature,
but it is as deadly as any, and is the most penetrating and
pervading of all. Ambition is consistent with the noblest
and most generous aims. Sometimes indeed 'tis but their
splendid herald. Avarice is selfish only, and its selfishness is
all meanness. It not only panders to self, but to all the
basenesses of self-seeking. It dwarfs the intellect, chokes
every generous impulse, rots every seed of human feeling,
tolerates no passion even, that is not, like itself, a lust. It
breaks, in fine, all links but one, and that the foulest, between

GEORGE PEABODY. 93

the miser and his species. What avarice is, the pursuit of
money tends to. The monks of St. Francis expressed a great
truth (though in what Bacon calls a "friarly" way) when
they warned Rienzi that money was not to be trusted. " The
purse of our Lord," they told him, " was committed to Judas.
If it had been meant as a good thing, it would have been
entrusted to St. Peter." Dealing with money — thinking of
it, turning it over — as an exclusive occupation, men become
as if under a demoniacal possession. And no fiend more
fearful ever entered human soul, than the vice which turns
hopes and affections, desires and aspirations, all, into self.
How grandly Tennyson has taught us, lately, in " The Holy
Grail," that all the heroism which ever sought earthly good
or heavenly reward is powerless to win them, unless self be
immolated on the altar.

" Galahad, when he heard of Merlin's doom,
Cried ' If I lose myself, I save myself.' "

Search the annals of men who have honored and blessed
their race ; look through the daily walks of lofty and of com-
mon life, of public service and of private toil ; go round the
circles of domestic love and happiness ; and, everywhere, you
find that the secret of one man's being held better than
another, and more loved and worthy of love than another;
the mainspring of men's permanent influence and real power
over other men and crowds of men ; is their capacity to with-
draw themselves from self — to bestow heart and soul upon
something outside of themselves ; upon some other living
creature; on friends, or country, or on all the creatures of
God. Analyse every good thing we do, from great to small,

94 GEORGE PEABODY.

and that will turn out to be its essence. Self-sacrifice, in all
its shapes, is made up of it. It speaks in a child's confession
of a fault, and it flushed the cheek of Curtius as he leapt into
the gulf. Patriotism is vapid hypocrisy, and the battle-field
murder, without it. The divine blood which the Knights of
Arthur sought after, with their swords and prayers, was shed
as a type of it and to be a lesson of it, from on high, forever.
And it is to this especial virtue, the root of all virtues and
of all true manhood, that money-hunting and money-handling
are essentially hostile and perpetually fatal. The hand goes
on grasping and holding fast, till it parts with all power but
that of grasping and holding. The heart and the muscles,
alike, lose every function but that of contracting. When old
Strahan, the printer, recalled to Dr. Johnson a remark of his,
that " there are few ways in which a man can be more inno-
cently employed than in getting money," he added, and with
entire unconsciousness of the force of what he was saying,
that " the more one thinks of this, the juster it will appear."
Johnson, whose experience in money-getting certainly entitled
his opinion to great weight, and who fully appreciated the
justice of his own observations, appeared to think so too.
And, in fact, it is the thinking of it which perverts the judg-
ment and corrupts the heart. The more one thinks of it,
the more he yields to it, and the less he is able to think of
anything besides. Thus is it that we see, so often, the large
designs, the long-considered plans, of men whose natures in
themselves are kindly, made futile — sometimes simply des-
picable— by their incapacity to loose their hold upon the
merest superfluities of fortune. Thus is it, that benevolence
so often sinks into that " painted sepulchre of alms," a testa-

GEORGE PEABODY. 95

mentary bequest, and only the relaxation of the dying moment
can open the clutching fingers.

It is this which I promised to consider, when I spoke, a
little while ago, of the single and melancholy circumstance
which made it otherwise than strange that rich men did not
find, in giving, the highest pleasure and privilege of wealth.
And it is because George Peabody was above all this : because
he made himself a rich man, from poverty, without being cor-
rupted by great riches ; because the soil of his nature was so
generous, that the very root of all evil sprang up to immeas-
urable good in it — it is for this that the world reverences him
to-day. Not merely for the good he did, since that depended
on his means and opportunities, and must depend, to a great
extent, upon others hereafter — not for the magnitude of his
offerings, for his wealth was but the platform which lifted
his virtues into sight — but because he furnished an example,
never known in the world before, of a man who united all
the love of money, which makes men richest and most men
meanest, with all the scorn of its dominion which burns in
the noblest soul. To live a life of painful and painstaking
acquisition : to wrestle with covetotisness, while climbing
from early destitution to the height of what a covetous
heart could desire ; and then to put his foot upon his gains
and their temptations, like a gladiator on a wild beast van-
quished— this is the spectacle which has made the world's
amphitheatre tumultuous. Nor is the shout for the moment
only, to be lost in the common noise. So long as men shall
wrestle in the same arena and other men look on, it shall ring
in the ears of the wrestlers and nerve them to win their fight.
There is no death in victories like this, for such deeds of our

96 GEORGE PEABODY.

better nature partake of its own immortality. Men wonder,
after long centuries, at the Diocletians and the Amuraths,
who flung away the purple when it was the only symbol of
power; and now that money is king over kings, they must
remember, with greater admiration, the rich man who dis-
crowned himself. In proportion to their admiration are the
greatness and the lesson of his example.

And let us not forget how much the simple dignity of that
example has added to its lustre. We are familiar with the
honors which were tendered to Mr. Peabody — the tributes
of national gratitude and popular affection and respect, which
crowded, as it were, around him, in his later day. He knew
their value fully — no man better. He knew it too well to be
indifferent to them and he was too much a man to affect
indifference. He felt that the kind, the almost affectionate
words which the Queen of Great Britain addressed to him,
were not merely the generous utterance of her own womanly
and gentle thought, but expressed the feeling and opinion of
a great and manly people, whose applause is almost fame.
He cherished the sympathy and praise of his own country,
as a man listens to the blessing of his mother. He loved
approbation, like most men who deserve it, and its expres-
sion was the more welcome to him, because he knew it was
deserved. Yet he was shaken from his poise by neither
praise, nor gratitude, nor honors. He was unchanged, as if
his right hand had not heard of the doings of his left. He
passed under the arches, without a thrill or a gesture of
triumph, and his life, after, was as his life before. In all
that he has made us proud to remember, we can remember
nothing more proudly than this.

GEORGE PEABODT. 97

To such a life there could be but a fitting close :

" His twelve, long sunny hours
Bright to the edge of darkness ; then the calm
Repose of twilight and a crown of stars ! "

Having thus given, imperfectly I know, but to the best
of my ability and with all the fulness which the occasion will
permit, my honest though humble judgment of the life and
character of Mr. Peabody and the great moral taught by his
career — having striven, above all things, to speak of him
nothing but the truth — I should feel that my duty was
discharged, if I stood anywhere save where I am. But
here, in Baltimore, upon the soil of Maryland, in the pres-
ence of so many of her citizens and their official representa-
tives assembled in his honor ; surrounded, on his birth-day,
by his old companions, by the memories of his devotion and
the tokens of his bounty ; I feel that there is something more,
which should not go unsaid. I care not to speak of the
resources he placed at our disposal for the education and
improvement of our people, nor even of the signal service
he rendered to the State in the days of her financial weak-
ness and humiliation. What we owe him, for these things,
need not be told. Our sense of their value is written in
grateful words on our Legislative records ; and they are part
of our history, as they will be of our remembrance, for ever.
But the good-will which prompted them, and which cannot
be measured, should not pass unacknowledged to-day. We
are proud of that confidence in the rectitude of our people,
which made him our champion, before the world, when
some of the best and wisest among ourselves had fallen
13

98 GEORGE PEABODY.

away from their faith in our honor. We rejoice, for his
sake not less than for our own, to have proved that his
confidence was just — to have aided him in vindicating the
lofty principle of his life, that to think well of mankind is
wisdom. We recall, with tenderness, the attachment he felt
for our City, as "the home of his early business, and the
scene of his youthful exertions." We give him back the
sympathies which distance and time could not weaken in
his bosom nor prosperity efface. We cherish the feeling
that he was one of ourselves — that if he had given away
his heart, as dying kings give theirs, he would have sent it
to be buried among us. We cling to his fame and his exam-
ple as part of our own heritage, and to the brotherhood which
was between us, as even dearer than his fame.

But other considerations, belonging to this place and this
occasion, press upon me yet more engrossingly than these.
There is an Eastern story, of a man who could bear a thousand
pounds weight, but a single hard word was too heavy for
him ; and there are times when to hush that word and say a
single one of kindness, is the grandest act and the richest gift
of charity. Upon this very spot — it seems but yesterday,
though years and death have come between — I heard Mr.
Peabody pour out his heart, on the occasion to which I
alluded in my opening. How what he said affected others,
they knew best, but thinking and believing of him, truly, all
that I have sought to say, I own that I have felt and said
it twice as warmly, in memory of that day. He had lived
among us, a Northern man among a Southern people, loving
and beloved. He had left us happy and united — he returned
to find us sullen and divided. The wounds of our then recent

GEORGE PEABODY. 99

civil strife were yet unhealed. Political antagonisms, social
resentments, personal and even domestic animosities, were still
rankling, and it was next to impossible for any man to speak,
without offence to some one whom he cared for, of what
brooded so ominously over the hearts of so many. But Mr.
Peabody felt that his opportunity was great for good, and
that opportunity made duty. He took the chances of offence,
and spoke what was in him, like a man. While he pro-
claimed that his sympathies had been always with the Union
and his hopes with the success of its armies, he dared to
proclaim, at the same time, his respect for the integrity and
manhood of the vanquished. He traced and recognized, with
the philosophy of truth and kindness, the influence of birth
and education on opinion. He braved the censure of zealots,
on the one side, by dealing with the convictions of the South
as error, he braved it equally, upon the other, by a manly
protest against confounding such error with crime.

"Never, therefore," he said, "during the war or since,
have I permitted the contest, or any passions engendered
by it, to interfere with the social relations and warm friend-
ships which I had formed for a very large number of the
people of the South. . . . And now, after the lapse of these
eventful years, I am more deeply, more earnestly, more pain-
fully convinced than ever, of our need of mutual forbearance
and conciliation, of Christian charity and forgiveness, of
united effort to bind up the fresh and broken wounds of the
nation."

I know of more than one estrangement which those noble
words of his reconciled. I know of more than one bosom,
in which they dried the waters of bitterness — more than one

100 GEORGE PEABODY.

fountain of tears, long sealed, which they opened. Time will
be, when men shall wonder that such counsels could ever have
been needed, and more will be the marvel that even passion
did not blush to deny them welcome. Here, where he uttered
them, and standing almost in his presence, I do them grateful
reverence. And when I think how the charity from which
they sprang went out into the desolate places of war ; how it
poured its treasures into kindly and trusted hands, that they
might minister to the higher needs of our crushed and helpless
kindred ; I seem to see a light around the good man's image,
more radiant, tenfold, than the sunbeam which flashed across the
Abbey to his pall. These crowning acts of his whole life — its

"bright consummate flower — "

gave all that was needed, of fulness, to its lesson, and all that
could be added, of greatness and beauty, to his example. He
had taught us that brilliant qualities of intellect or character
are not indispensable to make men useful or honored, and
that the real benefactors of their kind are not they at the
sound of whose name the world stands still. He had shown
how the humble and the poor may lift themselves among the
great ones of the earth, by industry, integrity and independence,
and how the rich may keep above their riches, by clinging to
the treasure of their souls. He had taught how the simple
dignity of manhood may rise superior to rank and station,
and that all the grandeur of power lies only in its uses. He
had ennobled wealth by his touch, as knights give knight-
hood, and established as the canon of its primogeniture that
humanity is its first-born. It was only left for him to show

GEORGE PEABODY. 101

to his own brethren, that men may love their country without
intolerance, may fight her battles without hate, and be con-
querors without revenge.

The blessing of the peace-makers be upon him and his
memory !

ADDRESS

DELIVERED BEFORE

THE LAW CLASS

OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND,

AT THE

Annual Commencement of the Law Department,

JUNE 15TH, 1872.

ADDRESS.

THE Faculty of Law, gentlemen, have done me the honor
to request that I should vary, upon this occasion, the
routine of my official intervention, and — not exactly deliver
you -an oration, as I see is announced — but address you more
at length than would otherwise have been my province. I
should have yielded to their wishes with less reluctance, had
my engagements permitted me to command the time for more
careful thought and preparation. Indeed, agreeable as is the
duty, in itself, to one whose sympathies are warmly with the
struggles and aspirations of youth, I should hardly have under-
taken to discharge it, but for the assurance of that indulgent
consideration from my professional brethren, which only men
who are themselves over-tasked can fully feel to be the right
of their over-tasked fellows. When the career upon which you
are just entering shall begin to be near its close, you will be
more fortunate than they who have preceded you, if your recol-
lections of the best efforts of your lives shall not be clouded by
the painful consciousness that you were able to give to them
but divided faculties and the weariness of a jaded brain.

Before I go farther, gentlemen, you must permit me to
congratulate you upon your good fortune, and the good judg-
14 105

106 COMMENCEMENT

ment of your advisers, in the selection of the means which
you have chosen for elementary professional instruction. I
do not say this as matter of form, nor by way of compliment
to the able and accomplished teachers of whose learning and
labors you have enjoyed the fruits. Professional opinion has
been very much divided as to the advantage of university-
instruction, by way of lectures, to students of law. My own
experience and observation, I confess, have not inclined me
towards that system, if pursued with any approach to exclu-
siveness. In England, the sentiment and custom of the pro-
fession have hitherto been strongly against it, and, even now,
the effort to make it compulsory there is resisted by some of
the ablest and broadest intellects of the Bar. Even those of
the laity, who are in the habit of rallying us upon that
"glorious uncertainty," which they seem to think belongs
to the law, as contradistinguished from the rest of human
things, would be surprised to know the extent of the conflict
which exists on this point, among those who are best qualified
to judge. In a recent debate in the House of Commons, upon
certain resolutions of Sir Roundell Palmer, relating to the
establishment of a school of Law in London, this diversity
of opinion was almost amusingly developed. The learned
and eminent author of the resolutions used strong language
in regard to the existing system of office-education. I doubt
whether he would have made it less strong, if his experience
had extended to this country as well as to his own. He said
it is, " in truth a hand-to-mouth system, under which every-
body is left to pick up his own instruction in law, as well as
he can, entirely with a view to practice, and by doing it in
that manner, with the assistance of those who are themselves

ADDRESS. 107

engaged in practice, it is impossible that any foundation of a
scientific knowledge of the law can be laid, however desirable
it may be; and, as a matter of fact, it is not." He then
spoke of the law itself, in terms any thing but respectful.
"There is no doubt," he said, "that the body of our law
contains many most excellent things, yet it is, on the whole,
a very unmethodical and undigested mass." He went further,
and drew a distinction between " the technicalities of the Eng-
lish law, or that sort of law which people study in England
and practice in the English Courts," and "the law as a
system and a science." He thought that the simplification
of the law depended upon its scientific teaching; and that
such teaching and the formation of scientific and enlightened
lawyers by it, were best to be secured by the establishment
of a great legal University, with lectures and scholarships,
and with examiners whose certificate should be essential to
admission.

The project was opposed by no less distinguished a leader
(among others) than the Attorney General, Sir John Coleridge.
He professed to agree with the learned mover, in principle,
but, as is usual in such case in our Craft, (if I may be per-
mitted to say so,) he differed the more widely on that account,
from Sir Roundell, in applying it. He said that " to teach
English law by lectures was a pure delusion. It could be
learned by practice only, and that " — he was irreverent enough
to add — " on account of its unscientific system." He hoped
" to see the day when the scandal of unscientific law would be
removed by a Code," but, without a Code, he insisted that
"it is utterly impracticable to teach the law, as it stands,
without practically demonstrating it in the Courts."

108 COMMENCEMENT

The resolutions were negatived by the House, though not
altogether on grounds which preclude their principle from
being, to some extent, hereafter adopted. I have referred to
the debate, chiefly because it shows how much more sharply
than perhaps you are aware, the line is drawn, among leading
professional thinkers, between the advocates of office-routine
and those who favor University-instruction. The conflict of
these extreme opinions seems to justify to my own judgment
the middle view which it has for many years approved. I
mean the superiority of the double system, of which it has been
our effort to give you the advantage, under the auspices of the
University of Maryland. You have had, on the one hand,
the benefit of a thoroughly practical office-education, with
daily attendance on the Courts, and, upon the other, you have
been carefully and systematically trained by your Professors
in legal principles and reasoning. The tendency of the office
to sharpen, contract and render technical, has been met and
counteracted by that larger exercise of thought, which expands
the intellect and weds analysis to generalization. The Regents
of the University are pleased to be able, from the report of
your teachers, to express their gratification at the diligence
and success with which you have labored to improve the
opportunities afforded you. It is but just for us to recognize
the promise of usefulness and honor which your opening
career has given.

You of course understand your present position, and know
what lies' before you, too well to be discouraged by the sug-
gestion that your labors, thus far, have brought you but to
the beginning of your fitness for the task you have undertaken.
The future is to be for you not only an enduring struggle for

ADDRESS. 109

success, but a perpetual effort to deserve it. You not only
cannot stand still where you now are in knowledge, but there
will be no point in your career, protracted and fortunate as
it may be, at which you can safely rest, in the conviction that
you have learned enough and need labor no more. On the
contrary, you will find the horizon expanding and receding as
you advance ; and, long as your day may be, the darkness will
come on while it is yet far away from you. Experience of
course gives confidence, and the long exercise of his powers
enables every man of sense to form a reasonable calculation
of his own strength and reasonably to trust it. So, too,
increasing knowledge, and familiarity with the use of it, beget
a proper and healthful self-reliance and self-possession as we
grow older; but it is only fools who become self-sufficient
with age. To the eye that has been trained in seeking after
truth and wisdom, the distance that lies behind us is always
less than that which is left to travel. With a life-long task
then before you, it becomes you to consider well how you
shall undertake it best. No man, of course, is able to make
his life a logical process, and deduce results from his plans
and calculations, like conclusions from premises; but it is
still possible for us, in the main, to give a general direction
to our course by following out some general ideas and princi-
ples. The greatest soldier, it is true, will often find that his
campaign depends as much upon his enemy as on himself.
His best plans quite as frequently will come to nought, but
still, a campaign without a plan is not very apt to end in a
Te Deum. If you would not find yourselves astray in a dark
wood like Dante, when you are " midway upon the journey "
of your lives, you must endeavor, now that the responsibilities

110 COMMENCEMENT

of manhood are opening upon you, to form some definite
understanding of what you have to do, and what your own
qualifications are for doing it. Concerning the latter branch
of the subject, mistakes are, I fear, as natural and as inevitable
to you as to the rest of us. With respect to the former, we
are all in the habit of making a good many more than are
necessary. We are much under the dominion of phrases,
which appear to mean a good deal, but really mean very little,
if any thing. We accept a great many things as axioms,
which are only platitudes. We pin our faith to the traditions
of "unlanterned nights," (as Lamb calls them,) the darkness
of which, heaven be praised, has long since departed. In all
this, I suppose we differ but little from the rest of the world,
for it is sad to think — nay, what a bloody lining there is
sometimes to the thought — how much the fate of individuals
and the fortunes of society and nations are made to hang
upon words, which are passionately taken to be things.

Assuredly there is no one who has less disposition than
myself to undervalue the profession to which I am proud to
belong. Least of all would I desire to lessen its attraction
or its value in your eyes, at a moment when you are looking
forward to its honors and rewards, in the first fulness of that
generous enthusiasm which is the brightest and most winning
of the traits of youth. But to understand what your calling
really is — to take the true measure of its importance and its
dignity — is only to be just to yourselves and to it. There
are many illusions which we ought never to part with so long
as we can persuade them to linger, but those which distort
to us the practical objects and purposes of our lives belong
to a different class.

ADDRESS. Ill

It is the fashion among us to speak of the law as a science,
and I cannot tell how many clever and ingenious young men
I have myself known, whose first experience of their profes-
sion, in its practical working and application, was made one of
painful disappointment, and almost disgust, by this exaggera-
tion. Jurisprudence is a science, certainly, and the noblest of
all sciences, in so far as it applies to the regulation of human
conduct that Eternal Law which "is laid up in the bosom
of God." But, Gentlemen, I pray you consider the distance
between jurisprudence, so understood, and the common law
of England as patched from the civil law and supplemented
by the Maryland Code! Doubtless, the common law, in
some of its titles and divisions, may justly be regarded as
eminently scientific. But to call it, as a whole and with all
its modifications, a science, or the exposition of a science, is
really to trifle and delude. The rhetoricians who liken it
to a great river, which has brought down upon its bosom
all the treasures of the realms of time through which it has
rolled, seem to forget that great rivers bring down many
things which are not treasures. They forget the waters,
turbid with ooze and slime — the worthless spoil of devas-
tated fields and homesteads ruined — the floating rottenness
and waste of ancient forests and primeval plains — the rafts
that cumber the surface, and the sands and stranded trunks
that lie in wait beneath for shipwrecks. I fear that the
simile, thus qualified, may be juster than it seemed at first ;
and I gave you, a moment ago, the exact language of some
of the learned and able lawyers who participated in the recent
debate in the House of Commons, in order that I might not
seem to be speaking with presumption, or to be alone and

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without authority, in saying what some might regard as
unduly derogatory to the system on which our profession
is grafted. Some uneasy suspicions in the same direction
must have crossed your own minds, I am sure, during your
studies, in spite of the reverence you naturally felt for the
mysteries into which you were about to be initiated. The
separation of Law from Equity must have stricken a rude
blow at your notions of juridical philosophy. When you
were first taught that a document with a scrawl to it was a
" sealed instrument," and of " higher dignity," as such, than
a paper identical with it, save as to the hieroglyphic in ques-
tion, your previous ideas of dignity must have been very
much shaken. But when you went further and learned that
this dignity was no " insubstantial pageant ; " that it dis-
pensed with proof of consideration; that it sanctified a
promise otherwise worthless; that it implied priority of
satisfaction, in certain cases, and gave the happy possessor
of the treasure four times as long to have the luxury of
suing as if the mystic sign were away, you must have had
some droll misgivings that your science, like that of human
nature, belonged to the class commonly called occult. When
you learned that an estate in land for ninety-nine years, renew-
able for ever, subject to the annual rent of a barley-corn, was
not only a lesser estate than one for somebody else's life, or
your own, but was of no higher respectability than a chattel,
and passed to the executor instead of the heir, you must have
had some difficulty in realizing that you were not the victims
of a puzzle. When you were gravely taught by learned men
— who were bound to teach it, whatever they might think
of it — that statutes derogatory of the common law must be

ADDRESS. 113

strictly construed, so as to alter the law as little as possible ;
in other words, that reformatory legislation must be prevented,
as far as practicable, from working the reform intended; it
must have cost you some time and thought, to understand
upon what theory of longevity such a canon of interpretation
could have survived until your time. Nor could the reasons
on which these anomalies are found have bewildered you much
less than the anomalies themselves. It is difficult to be recon-
ciled to the absurd and antiquated distinctions between the
law of real and the law of personal property, as administered
to-day, and the rights and remedies thereon dependent, by
being told that personal estate, in contemplation of law, is a
trifling and "transient commodity," of which, according to
Blackstone, our heroic Anglo-Saxon ancestors "entertained
a very low and contemptuous opinion." Such an opinion
was doubtless reasonable enough, in the days of King John,
when a wealthy Hebrew, on a gridiron, was their only bank-
ing institution, or even at the more advanced and enlightened
date, when Mr. Solicitor Coke knelt before his virgin mis-
tress, and her majesty's first pair of silk stockings had no
better carpet to be displayed on than a handful of rushes;
but it is hardly respectable, as a scientific basis of right,
in these days of coupon-bonds and aggregated capital. It
would be ludicrous, if it were not mortifying, to see the
most enlightened Courts compelled every day, by this
descended nonsense, to hold that the same words, in the
same paper, from the hands and mind of the same man,
and expressing, at the same moment, the same purpose and
intention, convey precisely opposite meanings when applied
to real and personal estate. Of a truth, Lord Coke spake
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114 COMMENCEMENT

wisely to King James, when he said that the reason of the
law is not " natural reason." It might perhaps require wis-
dom beyond Lord Coke's to show why it should not be.

In presenting these familiar illustrations of the sort of
science you are called on to expound, I do not seek merely to
make merry over the imperfections of our nursing mother.
It becomes you to recognize and understand the defects of the
system in whose service you are about to be enlisted, so that
you may do your part towards leaving it better than you find
it. You should enter your profession with no blind reverence
for its superstitions, but with a manly and rational respect,
forbidding you to confound its absurdities with its wisdom or
to suppose that its anachronisms are of its essence. Nolumus
mutare may have been a wise resolve, before Runnymede, but
one may be permitted to believe that times have changed since
then. We invite you therefore to a rational worship, and not
to make fetiches of ancient stocks and stones.

There is another delusion in regard to your profession,
which presents itself on the romantic side. I mean the notion
that lawyers are a sort of Round Table Knights, whose duty
and custom it is to sally forth, at all times, championing the
right and redressing the wrong. There is a popular impres-
sion that even if this be not the case, it ought to be. Large
numbers of benevolent people, who would deliberate long and
seriously before employing you, themselves, to protect the
widow and the orphan, are full of the charity which would
expect the poorest of you to do it at his own expense. Doubt-
less such persons are somewhat kept in countenance by the
frequent and foolish claim to that species of chivalry, which
is made in our behalf. To the practical mind, the difficulty

ADDRESS. 115

of providing sustenance for man and horse has always been
a stumbling-block in the way of knight-errantry, and in our
case it is as formidable an obstacle as in any other. And
alas ! even when Sir Tristram or Sir Lancelot girds on his
armor, with a righteous zeal, and goes out in pursuit of the
oppressor, is not Sir Pelleas or Sir Percevale retained for the
knave, and does not one of them sit mounted at his gate, with
his very best lance in rest ? Nay, if Lancelot and Tristram,
themselves, had been spoken to in time, are there not many
chances that they would have been upon the other side?
They would perhaps have thought better of the oppressor, in
that event ; for we see much more clearly through the glass,
when we are inside the house, than when we look in from
without. The time has never been, I glory in saying, when
the right has fallen to the ground for the lack of a lawyer to
defend it, at any and every cost, whether of liberty, or life,
or toil, or fortune. But the honor belongs altogether to the
noble men who do these good works. It is an honor which
they reflect on the profession — not honor borrowed from it.
They are brave men, who in any other condition or calling
would have stood up for the weak against the strong — devoted
men, who would have felt, anywhere, that the charities of life
are the chiefest of its duties and its pleasures. All that they
owe to their profession is the opportunity which it affords
them — the learning, the discipline and the experience which
make their energy efficient — the countenance and sympathy
which uphold their hands.

Germane to this subject is another professional pretension,
which it seems to me that candor does not justify — at all
events, in the broad sense in which it is generally urged. I

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refer to the claim, so commonly set up on behalf of the Bar,
that the world is indebted to it for free institutions and their
preservation. Here, again, I am persuaded that the glory
belongs to individuals and not to the profession. What the
Barons of England crushed with their gauntleted hands, were
but the long contrived devices of lawyers, who had pandered
to usurpation. Hume speaks but the truth, when he tells us
that the great rights established and consecrated by Magna
Charta had to struggle long " with the chicanery of lawyers,
supported by the influence of power." Go over the whole
history of English freedom, and ever against the illustrious
champions in whose fame we rejoice, you will find a herd
arrayed, of " vile prerogative fellows " — equally the offspring
of your profession and full of its learning and intellect — who
wrought all night, like Penelope, to unravel the shroud which
genius and courage had woven, all day, for tyranny. Turn
back a quarter of a century before the day when Lord Coke
became immortal as the framer of the Petition of Eight, and
you will blush to see him, as Solicitor General of " that thrice
noble and vertuous Queen Elizabeth, of ever blessed memory/'
and Speaker of her faithful Commons, engineering her subsidy-
bills through the House, like a slave, and laying the lives of
himself and his fellows "prostrate at her feet to be com-
manded." You remember, how, even in his old age, in the
Preface to the First Institute, he chatters about her " roseal
beauty" — but that is nothing to the adulation with which
Mr. Speaker grovelled before her, and told her how " under
her happy government, they lived upon honey, and sucked
upon every sweet flower." For himself, he assured her that
he was but a corpus opacum, in the absence of her "bright

ADDRESS. 117

shining wisdom." He must have been more opaque than he
said, if her thrice virtuous Majesty did not see through all that.

But why should we go back to the Tudors for proof that
the learning and ability of your profession are not always
with right and liberty against power? Young as you are,
the annals of your own times and your own land are full
of the sad story of professional subserviency, cowardice and
prostitution. It is part of the history which you have been
compelled to read. It is bound up with the law which you
have had to study. You cannot escape it in the judgments
of tribunals, alas ! too many and too high. You must sigh
over it, in the altered Constitution of your country.

And this brings me to another and like theme — the tradi-
tional and glorified image of the advocate — not in his capacity
of legislator and popular leader, but in his place at the bar,
vindicating the rights of the citizen against the power and the
malice of rulers. I touch this illusion with reluctance, for I
have not forgotten the kindling of the imagination at the
eloquence of Curran or of Erskine, which lights and warms
the hopes and the ambition of early and generous manhood.
I know how the pulse quickens, and the heart swells — how
the very soul rises up, with the dream and the longing, that
some day or other the time may come, when we too shall have
our chance of fighting that glorious fight, and fighting it to
win or die. I know how even the dull brain persuades itself
that great thoughts might be struck from it by the collisions
of such a conflict, and the torpid tongue feels as if, in such
an hour, it too might be cloven and aflame. Thanks to our
better nature for such dreams and such ambitions, which lift
us on their wings above all that is sordid and mean ! And yet

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I fear that, like too many of the creatures of enthusiasm, they
fade away, because they are dreams only. We are stirred, as
with a trumpet, by the words of the great English advocates
whom we revere, but we forget the eminent crown-counsel,
our brethren likewise, whose story, good or bad, is a part of
the record of our profession, and who fought for the wrong
as our champions for the right. We forget Ealeigh, when we
remember Coke, but history has a better memory, and the
strident voice of Mr. Attorney as he shouts to his victim —
" thou spider of hell ! " — will float on its echoes in shame
forever. Nor, strange as it may seem, can we expect in this
country the same opportunities of distinction which arose in
England in so many cases now historical. Indeed, even there
they can seldom again occur, popularized as British institu-
tions have become. What we are still pleased to call a repub-
lican system, here, is approaching nearer, day by day, to a
pure democracy. We cannot all meet in one place, as they
did in the classic times, and legislate and adjudicate by simple
outcry. But we are endeavoring to approach that happy
condition, as nearly as our territory and population will allow,
and every department of government is expected practically
to represent the will of the majority, even if it be but a
majority of one. What is expected in that way, we know,
from experience, generally happens after a while ; and it may
be regarded as established doctrine, that constitutions should
(or at all events will) interpose no permanent obstacle to its
happening. In ordinary times, when passion is asleep and
fellow-countrymen are content to make money out of each
other and be fraternal and happy, the majority do not desire
to oppress the minority, except perhaps in the way of business.

ADDRESS. 119

There is then no room for championship, because there are no
victims, and all goes " merry as a marriage bell." In such
times, we roam in the Elysian fields of democracy and justly
call them blessed — little thinking how near we are to another
and a different place in the Plutonian realm. But let strife
come, and bitterness and blood, and there is no despot like a
majority enthroned. A mob in its wrath is the wildest of
wild beasts, and it is none the less savage, when its ferocity is
formalized into law, and it rends its victims with the cold,
hard hands of what it calls its justice. There is no place for
the advocate then. His eloquence is a vain breath, and his
courage, at best, but a noble insignificance. The divinest of
divine rights is against him, and the very " Palladium " itself
is a part of the enraged divinity. The voice of the people — is
it not the voice of God ? And is not the majority the people ?
Having felt it my duty to say thus much to you of what
may perhaps have been in some regards discouraging, I
rejoice that we can still welcome you to a profession which,
stripped of all false pretences and exaggerations, is worthy
your best faculties, your highest qualities, your complete and
earnest self-dedication and devotion. Its influences are as
wide as society. Its duties are arduous, elevated, delicate
and responsible. Its honors and rewards, when fairly sought
and earned, may fill the measure of a great ambition. You
cannot be too wise, too learned, or too virtuous for it. You
can make all knowledge tributary to it, and yet not tran-
scend its compass. With the common midnight oil of its
lamp you may burn the most precious perfumes, and yet not
waste them. On the other hand, I am bound to say that it
is a calling which you can readily degrade, degrading your-

120 COMMENCEMENT

selves along with it. Instead of an honorable and liberal
profession, you may convert it, with fatal ease, into a sordid
trade, which no talent can dignify, no eminence can make
other than corrupting and corrupt.

You must bear in mind that although yours is a learned
profession, it is an eminently practical one — living and mov-
ing and never standing still. Its archaeology therefore belongs
to its literature, rather than its life. You have no time to
waste on its quaint pedantries and scholastic riddles. Petere
fontes quam sectari rivulos is a very good maxim, but it must
not be too literally followed. It is well to know the heads
of the streams and what is to be found there, but you cannot
afford to sit angling, with Piscator and Venator, by the water-
side, and meditating under the willows. You are to be men
of active thought — not antiquarians. You must keep your
every-day faculties bright for every day use, and train them
to keep pace with every day's progress. More than any
other quality or condition of mind, your profession demands
that enlightened practical sagacity which is known as common
sense. Do not misunderstand me. Your merely practical
men are useful, doubtless, and often successful, in their way.
But they are, for the most part, little and contracted — excel-
lent and worthy drudges if they are good men — almost inevit-
ably pettifoggers, unless under remarkable moral restraint.
When, therefore, I exalt common sense, I do not speak of
the small sense of that class of people. I mean the large
assimilative faculty, which digests the learning of the pro-
fession into solid and useful food — which extracts substantial
knowledge from study, and not theories or speculations — which
makes the intellect capacious and healthy, cleaning it wholly

ADDRESS. 121

of cobwebs and crotchets. It has been otherwise forcibly
described as " rectitude of understanding." All cannot pos-
sess it in its highest, or indeed in a high degree, but all
should strive to cultivate it and develop it. Without it, you
may go on studying more and more and knowing less and less,
every day, for all useful purposes, until your minds become
as crowded and confused as the last edition of a popular and
much-edited text-book.

But although what I have just said is universally true in
our profession, it is still proper to observe, that we are apt
to generalize too much in speaking of the faculties and quali-
ties which it demands — as if all its departments required the
same gifts. This is as far as possible from being true. In
this country, and notably in this State, the organization of
the profession is so imperfect, and there is so little distribu-
tion of its various functions, that almost every lawyer is
compelled to prepare himself, well or ill, for the labors of
every department. It is only in very exceptional cases, and
where there is great good fortune as well as peculiar ability
and adaptation, that a Maryland lawyer is able to choose his
own path altogether — unless indeed he selects the humblest.
This is a great evil, of course, and our community, until of
late, has been too small to justify us in attempting to remove
it. It not only prevents that concentration of thought and
pursuit which is necessary to the highest excellence, but
renders burdensome, almost beyond endurance, the toil of
an ordinarily successful career. In the absence of a proper
professional classification, the wisest thing you can do is to
endeavor to classify yourselves — to find out what you are
best fitted for, and devote yourselves to it. How many of
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122 COMMENCEMENT

our brethren do we not daily see, who waste, in the struggles
of the trial-table, for which they are wholly unfit, abilities
which would yield them reputation, in the quiet of chambers ?
How many, whose tact and cleverness would give them name
and place at the bar, are digging and delving, in hopeless
drudgery, perhaps self-imposed? Of course, it is not the
easiest thing in the world for a man to measure his own
abilities fairly, and there is nothing about which the public
is more apt to differ from us than the estimate we place upon
ourselves. There is some consolation, it is true, in knowing
that the public judgment is not always very enlightened or
discriminating. It sometimes assigns us places for which
even we ourselves know that we are wholly unfit. Indeed
it is often surprising to see how men will deliberately select
blind guides, who lead them into the ditch, and into how
many ditches some men will consent to be led. It is one of
the hardest trials, for young men of real ability, to have to
witness such exhibitions, yet you will have to witness them
and be patient. The best use that you can make of the
inevitable season of hope deferred, is to study yourselves : to
find out, by honest, manly self-examination, what you are
best fitted for, so that, when you see your opportunity, you
may know it and seize it. I do not mean that you should
yield to the temptation of subsiding into what is easiest, any
more than that you should commit the folly of aspiring to
what is beyond your reach. Earnest and continued effort
will often develop into great effectiveness, powers of which
men were hardly conscious at the beginning— just as con-
spicuous failure will demonstrate the delusion under which
they have exaggerated their abilities. But, be assured that

ADDRESS. 123

nothing worse can happen to any man, young or old, in the
matter of which I speak, than to persuade himself that he is
an admirable Crichton and can develop himself into anything
he pleases to be. In such case, he is apt to be developed into
nothing but a warning to others.

After what has been told you of the scope and dignity of
your profession, it will perhaps seem paradoxical in me to
say, that some of the highest intellectual and moral qualities
which you possess may perhaps partially disqualify you for
success, and especially as advocates. Nevertheless, it is true,
and to feel it is another of the most trying experiences through
which young men of merit can pass. Although the scheme of
our calling has been framed with great wisdom for the attain-
ment of truth and justice, it is nevertheless an artificial scheme,
and hence is much misunderstood. No one has described it
better than Sydney Smith — no one so well, to my knowledge.
In his remarkable sermon, entitled "The Lawyer that Tempted
Christ," he says that, " Justice is found experimentally to be
most effectually promoted by the opposite efforts of practised
and ingenious men, presenting, to the selection of an impartial
judge, the best arguments for the establishment and explana-
tion of truth. It becomes, then, under such an arrangement,
the decided duty of an advocate to use all the arguments in
his power to defend the cause he has adopted, and leave the
effects of those arguments to the judgment of others." Thus
it will be seen that our function, as advocates, is one of per-
suasion rather than of demonstration — to illustrate, discuss,
convince, not to ordain or to establish. We deal, forensically,
with arguments concerning truth, rather than with truths.
Now, although many ingenious men are undoubtedly deluded

124 COMMENCEMENT

and misled by their own ingenuity, I fancy that he discusses
truth best — he presents the views and arguments most ably,
by which others are to arrive at it — who has sought after
it most earnestly, and understands it best himself. While,
therefore, it is undoubtedly the fact, as the wise preacher adds,
that this practice of an advocate is not without danger to the
individual, however useful it may be for the administration
of public justice, I am sure that it is compatible with the
highest sense of truth and the manliest respect for it. I am
confident that the intellects and the principles which are safest
from danger because of it, are those of the ablest and best
and most successful advocates. Nevertheless, there are minds
and characters of high order, which are not plastic enough to
adapt themselves to it. There are many men whose con-
sciences are no tenderer than those of their fellows, but whose
minds are so constituted that they cannot reason, except in
the direction of their own convictions or conclusions. There
are others, whose instincts embarrass them in doing this, even
when they are satisfied that it is their duty to do it. An
observation recently made, in a leading English periodical,
concerning the late Earl of Elgin, will fully illustrate my
meaning. "He would have failed utterly as a professional
advocate," the writer states, " from his inability, even for the
sake of argument, to look at one side of a question only and
close his eyes to the other. His intellectual and moral con-
stitution rendered it impossible for him to see a truth and
conceal it." This is a portrait of a wise and great character, or
of an extremely impracticable one, according to circumstances.
Such traits may give us a great moralist or a mere dogmatist —
an enlightened judge or a perpetual doubter and dissenter.

ADDRESS. 125

With large and vigorous intellect — great energy and wisdom,
and an instinctive perception of truth and right — men of that
stamp may lead the thought and mould the temper of a
century. With more limited faculties and a less ample nature,
they are apt to stand in the world's way — the victims of their
own scruples and the chief disciples of their own opinions.
When an ordinary man is so sure of himself as to exclude
from the possible categories of truth all that does not seem
true to him, his intellect is at least in no great danger of
suffering from over-expansion.

But, whatever be the gifts of this class of minds, they are
certainly not those of the advocate. It may be a compliment
to them to say this ; but for us who are considering the ele-
ments of professional success, it is sufficient to know that they
will find their idiosyncrasies an obstacle — none the less per-
plexing, perhaps, from being worthy of respect. They lose
sight of the fact that the questions they are discussing are
often new and therefore speculative ; that the truths involved,
most commonly, are purely artificial. They will accordingly
hesitate — or scorn, if you please — to address arguments to the
judgment of others, which do not convince their own. They
will shrink from advancing theories which they feel or sus-
pect to be fallacious. They will restrain suggestions, perhaps
conclusive to others, because they would not themselves adopt
them. Now, there might be some reason why counsel should
be silent, when they think themselves in the wrong, if they
were always in the right when they believed themselves to be
so. Unhappily, this is not the case. I will not speak of
juries — for their ways are too much in the depths of the
sea — but the Courts are constantly teaching us the vanity

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of our conclusions — overruling us, when we are most firmly
persuaded of success, and then kindly refusing to share our
doubts, when we are half-persuaded they are insurmountable.
If, therefore, we have nothing to urge on their consideration
but our own convictions, we are fighting a one-sided battle
and asserting our infallibility at the cost of our clients. I
have known causes lost by capable men, for no other reason
than that they were too fully convinced of the conclusiveness
of a favorite point, to feel the necessity of urging others
equally obvious. They forgot that it was their business to
convince other people and not themselves merely, and that
all minds are not alike.

You may perhaps make another discovery, early in your
practice, quite as disheartening as the fact which we have
just been considering. You may find that the tastes and
the accomplishments which nature and education have given
you will not always hasten — nay, possibly, may retard — your
advancement. A young man of high culture and self-respect
must shrink, in spite of him, from many of the first lessons
of his experience. He will find himself expected, yet utterly
unable, to welcome and embrace things which repel and dis-
gust him. He will be ashamed to surrender himself to the
tawdry and threadbare commonplaces and conventionalities
which enter so largely into a certain department of forensic
discussion. He will almost envy the dulness which is uncon-
scious of its self-exposure, and the ignorance which runs on,
because it does not know when it has run out. He will
wonder, painfully, whether he can ever descend to the charla-
tanism and the fustian which he hears applauded to the echo,
if not by the judicious who grieve, yet at least by the ground-

ADDRESS. 127

lings who pay. He may sit — happy is he who does not
remember those weary and repining days — he may sit, idle
and poor, while incompetence and audacity advertise them-
selves and prosper, till he feels almost ready to curse, in
his despair, the very excellences which were the goal and
the ambition of his youth.

Nor am I sure that you will always find, even among the
elders of your calling, that encouragement and countenance,
in this regard, which might be expected from the leaders of a
liberal profession. It is not to be disguised that there is a
superstition still haunting the bar of this country — though in
England it has nearly disappeared and on the Continent never
existed — that a man cannot know much law, who knows
much of anything else. There are many able and successful
lawyers who devoutly believe of the law, as certain Mahorn-
medan sectaries of the Koran, that there is nothing written
outside of it which is good, and it is therefore sinful to read
any thing which is not in it. You will of course rarely hear
this proposition so nakedly or frankly stated; but you will
assuredly have to meet and overcome, as best you may, a
quiet and perpetual, and doubtless a sincere disparagement
of your professional ability, proportionate to the culture and
accomplishments with which you may be able to adorn it. I
trust that you will have the manliness to succumb to no such
prejudices, but will take your part, as enlightened and educated
gentlemen, in relegating them to the barbarism from which
they are descended. It may be that Lord Bolingbroke spoke
rather in excess, when he recorded his opinion, that " unless
men prepare themselves for this profession by climbing what
Lord Bacon calls the vantage grounds, Law is scarce worthy

128 COMMENCEMENT

a place among the learned professions — it degenerates into the
practice of the grovelling arts of chicane." His Lordship
perhaps attributed, as was his wont, too exclusive a control to
merely intellectual restraints. A greater than he has told us,
with a wiser and more courtly moderation, what every man
among us who strives to know himself, must know to be the
unexaggerated truth. " He was bred to the law," says Mr.
Burke, in speaking of Mr. Grenville, " which is, in my opinion,
one of the first and noblest of human sciences — a science
which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding
than all other kinds of learning put together; but it is not
apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and liberalize
the mind precisely in the same proportion." And it is because
the study and the practice of your profession thus tend to
narrow and not to liberalize the understanding, that you must
keep it broad and liberal, if you can, by wider and less arti-
ficial thought. You shall soon cease to know Hercules by
his foot, if it be kept cramped and bandaged like a Chinese
woman's. No, gentlemen ! Your profession calls upon you
for no sacrifice of your best gifts and powers. There is
room for all of them within it, unless pedantry has the
making of its pale. There is scope in it for Fancy and her
nobler sister Imagination. There is room for all literature,
all science and every liberal art. There is field for Wit
and for Humor, for Taste and Grace — for all that is splendid
in the mastery of Eloquence — all that can influence the
human mind and penetrate and control the human heart.
History has no record of an advocate whose genius and
culture were above his office; and it is in part the fault
of just such prejudice as I am combating, that we have so

ADDRESS. 129

few in the country, to-day, who approach the level of its
real greatness.

There is a consolation in reflecting, that when you are
called to overcome difficulties such as have been alluded to,
and others like them, you are required to do no more than
your brethren have done before you. I have seen a charming
French vaudeville, the whole point of which is in the contrast
between two lovers, one of whom loses all his ardor as soon
as he meets with an obstruction, while the other grows as cold
as Plato the very moment that obstacles disappear. The
devotion of the most ardent worshippers of jurisprudence is
hardly passionate enough to develop such vivid contrasts in
our professional drama ; but, in the main, the men who win
the favors of our "jealous mistress," are they whom difficulties
only brace to resolution. Given a certain amount of good
sense, force, and education, and — accident apart — the rest is
matter of perseverance, industry and courage. It may not
be to-day, nor to-morrow — it perhaps may never be. We
witness too many shipwrecks, to dare foretell a prosperous
voyage for every gallant bark that we " see from the beach
when the morning is shining." Still, we have the happiness
to know, that sooner or later, and with reasonable certainty,
success generally comes when it is deserved — though it often-
times may come when it is not.

But, gentlemen, what is success in your profession ? Upon
the answer which you give that question, in your hearts and
minds, will depend all of the career in which this is your
first step before the world. If success means to you only
business, and business, according to the clever sarcasm of
Dumas, means to you only " other people's money," you are
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130 COMMENCEMENT

wasting your time with professors and diplomas. You can
attain the ends of such an enterprise, by shorter processes
and simpler ways than any taught in universities. Do not
imagine that I can so far forget my duty as to perplex you
with cant and sentimentalism on an occasion like this, instead
of practical and healthy counsel. I know that you are begin-
ning the serious task of your lives — your struggle for a place
among your fellows, and for bread. I recognize pecuniary
reward as not only fit to be within your professional pur-
poses and just contemplation, as a right and a possession,
but as a means of that personal independence which is the
most "glorious privilege" of manhood. When my Lord
Chief Justice Montagu said, at his installation, " I have no
need to be corrupt, neither in action nor affection, for I have
estate sufficient/' he spoke, if in no higher spirit, at least as a
man of sense and of the world, who knew and acknowledged
the weakness of our nature and the supports which it needs,
at the best. It is no part of my purpose, therefore, to dis-
parage, in the slightest degree, the manly and reasonable
pursuit of professional emolument. It is your right, as I
have said, and you should insist on it, whenever it is a
question of mere right, and higher considerations do not
make it your pleasure or duty to resign it. You will find
strange notions on the subject in the community. Gentlemen,
in other walks of life, your own contemporaries, entering upon
their vocations side by side with you — your superiors in no
regard certainly, not even in the moneyed capital with which
they begin their career — will measure your labors and efforts,
years hence, by a scale which it would cause them great indig-
nation to have applied to their own daily commercial transac-

ADDRESS. 131

tions. They will earn, in an hour, by a single effort of
mercantile sagacity, or a single act of mercantile trust, what
would pay you, richly, for a half year's income, and yet
wonder at the exorbitance of your comparatively moderate
demands, for the most devoted and successful exertion of the
highest professional ability. Some men seem to think that
only money ought to breed money, and cannot understand
that the investment of character as high as theirs, in a calling
infinitely more laborious than theirs, requiring ten-fold the
learning and faculties which are needed in theirs, ought to
yield at least as large return as theirs, when the harvest-sun
is on the grain. They are almost like the Arab, whom Dr.
Hogg, the companion of Lamartine in the East, had cured of
a serious malady. As soon as the patient grew strong enough
to walk, he called on his physician for a present, and was
lofty and indignant when refused. " I had hoped," he said,
" to find you more disposed to show your gratitude to God,
for having made you wise enough to cure such dreadful dis-
eases." It is astonishing how many persons think that virtue
and knowledge are their own sufficient reward, when they
would otherwise have to pay the reward themselves. If,
then, fees come honestly and fairly in — fill your skull-caps
with them, if you have any, like my Lord Keeper Guilford,
and temper your exultation, if need be, as he did, by reading
Littleton's Tenures every Christmas.

What is to be shunned and deprecated is not that. It is
the surrender and subordination of your profession and your-
selves to gain — the abandonment of your dignity and freedom
to mere money-making and the base arts which are almost
inseparable from such degradation of a liberal calling. It

132 COMMENCEMENT

is a common thing to say that ours is a specially money-
loving age. I doubt whether this is true — whether men are
at all worse in that regard, to-day, than they have always
been, since the root of all evil was planted. In one of the
recently opened houses in Pompeii, a mosaic pavement has
been found, in the centre of which, in large letters, is the
motto, " Salve Luerum." Such a profession of faith, on the
part of the luxurious Roman whom the ashes of Vesuvius
overwhelmed with his lucre, was only a superfluous and
ostentatious piece of candor. Perhaps, like Lord Byron,
he desired to be taken for something worse than he was.
But he scarcely loved money any more than a robber baron
or a Lombard usurer, or any less than a Wall Street financier
or a lender on "approved collaterals." The curse of our
times is not the mere love of acquisition, nor of money as a
treasure and possession, but the self-prostration of society
before it, as a dignity, a principality and a power. The
Roman was content to print his text on the stones, and
tread it beneath his feet in the revel. In our times, we
reverence the wisdom which, in Poor Richard's Almanack,
expanded it into a gospel and founded on it a religion, whose
first and great commandments are multiplication and addi-
tion. And it is because money is, thus, not merely the
object of a common human lust among us, but of a homage
as degrading as that of the Castilian courtiers to the crowned
and sceptred corpse of Pedro's leman — that no friend can say
God-speed to you, without a word of warning. Down in the
abyss of such a worship may sink talents, learning, promise.
In it may be lost, without hope, every aspiration that is
noble, every principle that is pure, every quality that is

ADDRESS. 133

generous and high. Against its demoralizing propagandism
there can be no stronger bulwark, humanly speaking, than
the resistance and example of a learned and intellectual pro-
fession, powerful from its numbers and its influence ; intimate
and controlling in its necessary connection with every variety
of human affairs ; trained to vigorous and independent thought
and downright, public and effective speech. If it but dares
assert its dignity and character, there is no social agent which
has half its power to curb and to reform society. If it is
true to itself in speech and counsel ; if it has courage and
integrity enough to spurn association with fraud and wrong,
in every shape, and to expose and denounce them wherever
they appear, it can control whole classes of society, whom the
preacher will not reach and to whom moralists are a jest. If,
on the other hand, it is capable of nothing better than to sell
itself — to adopt every man's cause, and help or defend every
man's contrivance, who pays — it is a social nuisance and
deserves to be despised. Better "to lie in cold obstruction
and to rot," than to be part or parcel of it.

I speak plainly, — not because so to speak is virtuous, or
seems to be, but because your profession is growing in dis-
credit, and I fear deservedly, and because its regeneration
must come from within and not from without. You cannot
look to the public to reform professional morals, for, unfortu-
nately, whatever want of principle exists in our ranks is but
a supply created by the public demand. As long as we are
willing to touch pitch, the community, though it sneer at us,
will keep our hands defiled, to its profit at least as much as
ours. I pray you then to bear in mind, even in your lightest
day-dreams — in the framing of every plan and the nursing

134 COMMENCEMENT

of every hope — that while learning and intellectual versatility
and power are the thews and sinews of your calling, integ-
rity of purpose and of conduct is its living soul. Its every
relation, properly considered, involves confidence and implies
frankness, fidelity and honor. You owe these last, not merely
to the clients who trust you, but to the tribunals, the public,
your brethren and, above all, yourselves. You should be as
far above the charlatanry and imposture which deceive and
mislead, as the coarser dishonesty which plunders or lets
plunder. Nay, it is your business, not only to make honor
the guide of your own conduct, but to make no terms with
dishonor. The demoralization of the hour comes far less
from the sins which are committed, than from the slipshod
acquiescence by which honest men condone them. I know
that it is the fashion to call plain speech " invidious ; " and
of course any man who goes crying aloud, like Cassandra,
will probably be listened to no more than she, let him speak
what truth he may. But there are times when for a gentleman
to be silent is to forego a duty, because it is unpleasant, and
to compromise himself by unmanly toleration. He must take
the consequences of the accustomed slur — that he sets himself
up to be better than other people. Lord Bacon did undoubt-
edly himself take bribes, the while he exhorted Mr. Justice
Htitton to keep his hands " clean and uncorrupt from gifts."
But still there are such things, in fact, as honesty and dis-
honesty, and a professional man's position is not encouraging,
if he cannot say, without presumption or Pharisaism, that
there are some people than whom he claims to be better.

And now, gentlemen, a very few words to you as working-
men. You have dedicated yourselves to a pursuit which, in

ADDRESS. 135

its best estate, entails on you a life of toil. Whether or not
it shall be the toil of drudgery, unrelieved and unending,
depends in a measure on yourselves, and on what you shall
do for yourselves in this your season of freshness and strength.
Your first and most manifest necessity is to become thoroughly
grounded, so far as your talents may permit, in the principles
which are the true learning of the law. Simplification, the
happy result of all sound analysis, should be the prime object
of your labors. The more you rid your minds of non-essen-
tials, the nearer you will bring them to the knowledge which
avails. You are enlisted in an army where the knowledge
which does not avail belongs to the impedimenta, and must be
sent to the rear. You will need to be not only thoroughly
informed, but ready, and this last you can never be, unless
you have what you ought to know stored away within easy
reach, and unless, when you reach it, you can grasp it. " No
attorney," exclaimed Lord Tenterden, from the Bench, "is
bound to know all the law. God forbid that it should be
imagined that an attorney or counsel, or even a Judge, is
bound to know all the law." Yet there is not a mendicancy
more pitiful on earth, than that of a lawyer in active practice,
who has to beg, every day, from his books, the bread of his
daily need. But let me entreat you to have it ever present
before you, that the great end and effort of your labors should
be to learn to think. You may pile such a mountain of other
men's thoughts upon your minds that, though they were
Titans, they could not turn under it. Until a second Omar
shall rise up, in the order of Providence, to burn your books,
or the Courts shall agree, a little more generally, to prefer a
reason, now and then, to a report from some " far countree,"

136 COMMENCEMENT

you will of course have to wander much in the labyrinth of
cases. But, I charge you, wander there with cautious feet, and
do not delude yourselves with the conceit that case-hunting
is study or case-knowledge learning. You must keep side by
side, as I have said, with the progress of the law, but a single
shelf of your libraries will measure the most of that progress
which is real.

In the preparation of your causes, put no trust in genius
or inspiration. If a man ever has a great success without
working his best for it, it is rarely more than once in a life-
time— like marrying for love. Be careful, nevertheless, to
shun over-preparation, which is a grievous impediment to
thought and argument. It is painful to see how many causes,
which ought to be won, are lost, by being conscientiously
studied and tried to death.

Next to self-possession and self-control, the working quality
which will stand you most in stead, is clearness of mind and
speech. Whether the stream be deep or shallow, it matters
little what golden sands lie in the bed, if men cannot be made
to see them. Clearness of statement can hardly be without
clearness and directness of thought. This last, perhaps, is
commonly a gift of nature, but there are few good minds, in
which discipline and use will not breed a habit of it. It is
not given, as we know, to all men, to be eloquent, or great, or
very wise, but he whose mind goes straight to its own purpose
and conclusions, and can light the minds of other men along
its processes, as with the light of perfect day, has, as an
advocate, as little reason as the best to rail at fortune.

While nothing can be more unworthy of your calling than
the arts of sycophancy, there can be nothing worthier of it

ADDBESS. 137

than respectful courtesy to those who seek your counsel, and
kindly sympathy beyond the formal line of duty to them as
your clients. To be consulted as oracles and looked up to
from afar, is very pleasant, undoubtedly, to men of a certain
character ; but, in the end, they generally find themselves with
a small congregation of worshippers, while around the more
genial of their brethren there gather every year, fresh troops
of friends. And, after all, what is human life, at its proudest,
without human sympathies ?

On your personal intercourse with your brethren must to
a great extent depend the degree of satisfaction which will
attend your labors, whatever be their course or your success.
The antagonisms and the inevitable partisanship of the pro-
fession render it necessary for you to be ever on your guard,
lest you trench upon the rights and feelings of your fellows.
There can be no severer test, of both temper and manners,
than the trial-table, and few are so happily endowed as to be
superior always to its provocations and temptations. That
the best of us profit, as we should, by its lessons of forbear-
ance and self-restraint, it would be rash indeed to say ; but
when you shall have felt, as few escape, the mortifica-
tion which is inseparable from the consciousness of having
neglected them, you will understand how impossible it is
for you to heed them too much. To the Courts before
which you appear your first duty is deference and respect.
There can be no two things more different than discourtesy
and proper independence, in your dealings with them. A
right-minded and right-hearted judge is always at a disad-
vantage in a collision with counsel. The very superiority
of his position makes it doubly his duty and inclination to
18

138 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS.

forbear, and he hesitates to strike, lest the judge should be
moved by the resentment of the man. I need not say how
ungenerous it is to forget this and so forget yourselves. If
you would have, with the Bench and with the Bar, the
legitimate influence which is one of the most attractive of
professional rewards, you must give as well as take. You
must yield respect if you would receive respect. You must
be courteous, considerate and liberal, if you would have
courtesy, liberality and consideration. Above all, you must
deserve confidence if you would enjoy it ; and, believe me,
no weight of intellect, no copiousness of learning, will com-
mend you or your cause one-half so strongly as a life of stain-
less rectitude, of kindly offices, of manly frankness and of
lofty purpose.

ADDRESS

AT THE UNVEILING OF THE STATUE OF

CHIEF JUSTICE TANEY,

Delivered in the Senate Chamber, at Annapolis,

DECEMBER lOrn, 1872.

ROGER BROOKE TANEY.

REPORT AND ADDRESS OF THE CHAIRMAN OF
THE COMMITTEE.

YOUR EXCELLENCY :

BY an Act of the General Assembly of Maryland passed
at the Session of 1867, the sum of five thousand
dollars was appropriated for "the building or erecting a
suitable monument over the remains of the late Chief Justice
ROGER B. TANEY, on some suitable site in the State House
yard, or in the State House itself," and Messrs. G. Frederick
Maddox, of St. Mary's county, Chas. E. Trail and Hugh
McAleer, of Frederick county, James T. Earle, of Queen
Anne's county, Henry Williams, of Calvert county, and
George M. Gill and S. T. Wallis, of Baltimore city, were
appointed a committee to carry into effect the provisions
of the statute. Upon the organization of the committee, it
was found to be their unanimous desire that the execution
of the proposed work should be entrusted to the distin-
guished sculptor, Mr. William H. Rinehart, a native and
citizen of Maryland, for many years a resident of Rome.
The amount appropriated being wholly insufficient, not only

141

142 ROGER BROOKE TANEY.

to compensate the labors of so eminent an artist, but even
to meet the necessary cost of a monument at all worthy of
the State and the occasion, the committee entertained serious
doubts of their ability to discharge their duties satisfactorily,
without further legislative provision. From this embarrass-
ment they were happily relieved by the liberality and public
spirit of the artist himself, who responded to their invitation
by a prompt and unconditional acceptance of the commission.
It is gratifying to the committee to make official acknowledg-
ment of their obligations to Mr. Binehart, for the cheerful
readiness with which he not only undertook the work, but
volunteered to be content with the honor of the commission
as it stood, and the pride and pleasure of uniting with his
fellow-citizens in their tribute to the illustrious dead. The
committee, of course, did not feel that it became them so far
to tax the generosity of any individual citizen, and particu-
larly one to whom the State already owed so much, for the
reflected honor of his well-earned reputation. They, never-
theless, requested Mr. Rinehart to prepare them such design
as seemed to him appropriate, and the model of the present
statue was accordingly sent forward, while the General Assem-
bly of 1870 was in session. The engagement of Mr. Rinehart
and the plan of his work were so acceptable to the members of
both Houses, that an additional appropriation of ten thousand
dollars was at once made for the completion of the monument,
according to his design, and under the direction of the original
committee. It would be ungracious not to recognize the liberal
and most becoming spirit in which this legislative action was
taken, and its perfect accord with the deep and spontaneous
feeling which had welcomed the first appropriation.

ROGER BROOKE TANET. 143

The Legislature of 1867, as appears by the Act of that
date, had contemplated the removal of the remains of Chief
Justice Taney to the Capital of the State, and the erection
of the monument above them. The suggestion, in itself, was
eminently appropriate, for many reasons. It was here that,
as a student, he had laid the deep and broad foundations of
his professional learning and success. In the chamber where
we meet to-day, to do him honor — and to whose historical
associations this scene will add another, not the least — he
sat, for years, a Senator of Maryland, the peer of the dis-
tinguished men who sat around him, when no legislative
body in the Union surpassed that Senate in dignity, ability,
or moral elevation. In the Chamber there, above us, where
the honorable Judges, who join us in this tribute to his
memory, uphold the ancient credit of the State's Appellate
Bench, at the zenith of his reputation as advocate and
counsel and in the very ripeness of his powers, he shone,
the leader of the bar of Maryland, its actual not less than
its official head. And those were days too, when to lead it
was to walk in the footsteps of Pinkney and be measured
by the measure of his genius. If, therefore, he had slept
beneath this dome, or in its shadow, it would have been
with the dwelling-places of his fame about him, surrounded
by the olden and consecrated memories of the State, which
was but a revolted colony when he was born.

But the wishes of the Chief Justice himself, upon that
subject, had been too strong and were too sacred, to be vio-
lated by his children, even for the gratification of the public
desire. The quiet town of Frederick, the theatre of his
earlier professional distinction, was hallowed to him by the

144 ROGER BROOKE TANEY.

grave of his mother ; and when he left it, in mid life, for
larger spheres of usefulness and honor, he exacted the pledge,
from those who loved him, that he should be laid beside her
when he died. Nor was this the outbreak of fresh grief or
transient sentiment or feeling. — Through all his life of toil
and struggle, ambition, reward and disappointment, it was
his dearest longing; and there is something inexpressibly
touching in the warmer and more anxious hope with which
the world-worn man clung fast to it, as the period drew
nearer for its consummation. The literature of the English
tongue has nothing that exceeds in mournful tenderness and
grace the expression which he gave to it, in a letter written but
a little while before the pledge of friendship was redeemed.
Such a feeling — so devoted, and cherished for so long — it
would have been next to sacrilege to disregard; and the
Legislature of 1870 respected it accordingly by withdraw-
ing from the appropriation of their predecessors and their
own all but the one condition, which required the monument
to be erected where it stands. The final selection of that
locality, with its exposure, rendered it expedient that the
statue should be cast in bronze, and the Legislature, there-
fore, so directed.

With the erection of the monument, the prescribed duties
of the committee which I have the honor to represent were
substantially ended, but in view of the time which must
elapse before another session of the General Assembly, they
have deemed it due to the dignity of the occasion respect-
fully to invite the official intervention of your Excellency,
in delivering the finished work to the people of the State.
It would have been a pleasure to them, if they could have

ROGER BROOKE TANEY. 145

felt at liberty to anticipate the wishes of the Legislature,
or have ventured to ask that your Excellency would gratify
your own, by authorizing a more formal celebration than this
quiet homestead gathering.

As a few moments will disclose to us, the artist has chosen
to present us his illustrious subject in his robes of office, as
we saw him when he sat in judgment. The stature is heroic,
but, with that exception, the traits of nature are not altered
or disguised. The weight of years that bent the venerable
form has not been lightened, and the lines of care, and
suffering, and thought, are as life traced them. But, unless
the master's hand has lost its cunning, we shall see not
merely the lineaments we knew, but traces of the soul which
illuminated and informed them. The figure has been treated
by the artist in the spirit of that noble and absolute simplicity
which is the type of the highest order of greatness, and is
therefore its grandest, though its most difficult expression,
in art. The sculptor deals easily enough with subjects which
admit of ornament and illustration, or address the passions
or the fancy. The graces he can lend his work — the smiles
with which it wins us — the beautiful or joyous images or
thoughts with which he can surround it — each is to us an
open leaf of the fair poem which he writes in bronze or
marble. Like the chorus of a drama, they tell, even for the
worst of poets, far more than half his story. Another task
indeed it is, to embody in a single image the expression of a
great historic life, so that standing severe and apart, it shall
be its own interpreter, forever, to the generations of men.

The pathway of a great judge does not lead through the
realms of fancy. Neither in reality nor in retrospect is there
19

146 ROGER BROOKE TANEY.

much of the flush of imagination upon it or about it. With
such a career Art cannot deal, nor History, as with those
brilliant lives, which dazzle while they last and are seen
only through a halo when they are over. The warrior, the
orator, the poet — each in his way — is linked with the imagi-
nation or enthusiasm of mankind ; and so the broken sword,
the unstrung lyre, the shattered column with its cypress
wreaths, all have their voices for the common heart. But
the atmosphere of pure intellect and dispassionate virtue,
serene although it be, is far too cold for ordinary sympathies
to live in. The high ministers of human justice are segre-
gated from their fellows, by their very function, which shuts
out favor and affection. Fidelity to the obligation which
withdraws them from the daily interests and passions and
almost from the converse of society, is the patent of their
nobility in their great office. The loftier the nature, the
more complete its isolation, to the general eye — the fewer
the throbs which answer to its pulses. — Such men may be
cherished and beloved, in the personal and near relations
which are the dearest blessing of all lives. They may be
venerated and revered, so that all heads shall be bowed and
uncovered when they pass. But they go, when life closes,
into the chamber of heroes fated to dwell afar off, only in
the memories and minds of men.

When the great citizen whose image is beside us walked,
in his daily walk, amid our reverence, the simple beauty of
his private life was all before us. We can recall his kindly
smile, his open hand, his gracious, gentle speech. The elders
of our generation will remember how his stormy nature was
subdued, by duty and religion, to the temperance, humility

ROGER BROOKE TANEY. 147

and patience which we knew. All of us saw and wondered
how domestic sorrows, the toils and trials of his station, old
age, infirmity of body, ingratitude, injustice, persecution, still
left his intellect unclouded, his courage unsubdued, his forti-
tude unshaken, his calm and lofty resignation and endurance
descending to no murmur nor resentment. These things the
sculptor is not called to tell to those who shall come after us.
The pen of the biographer has worthily recorded them, and
just posterity will read what he has written. The image of
the Magistrate and Ruler, as the world was wont to see him,
is all that the chisel bequeaths to immortality — his image, as
History shall see it, when, ashamed of the passions of our
day, she shall be once more reconciled with Truth. With
this noblest of the tasks of Art, only genius may deal fitly —
yet genius has dealt with it, and its difficulties, overcome, are
the glory and the triumph of genius.

Thus, then, to-day, sir, the State of Maryland, with grate-
ful reverence and pride, commemorates a life, than which few
greater, and none loftier or purer, shall dignify the annals of
our country. It was a life coeval with her own, and a part
of her own, and she honors what she knew. It was a life of
patriotism, of duty, and of sacrifice ; a life whose aim and
effort, altogether, were to be, and do, and bear, and not to
seem. The monument her people rear to it is scarcely less
her monument than his to whom it rises. What changes
shall roll round it with the rolling seasons ; whether it shall
survive the free institutions of which Taney was the wor-
shipper and champion, or shall see them grow in stability,
security and splendor ; whether it shall witness the develop-
ment and beneficent expansion of the constitutional system

148 ROGER BROOKE TANEY.

which it was the labor of his life and love to understand and
to administer, or shall behold it,

"Like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till, by broad spreading, it disperse to naught" —

are questions which men will answer to themselves, accord-
ing to their hopes or fears — according to their trust, it may
be, in the Mercy and Providence of God. But Maryland
has done her part for good, in this at least, that she has
made imperishable record, for posterity, of the great exam-
ple of her son. She has builded as it were a shrine to those
high civic qualities and public virtues, without which, in
their rulers, republics are a sham, and freedom cannot long
abide among a people.

It was, I was about to say, the sad mischance — but, in a
higher though more painful sense, the privilege and fortune —
of Chief Justice Taney, to fill his place in times of revolution
and unparalleled convulsion — when blood boiled in the veins
of brethren, till it was red upon a million hands. In such a
crisis, no man so conspicuous as he, and yet so bound to shun
the rancor of the strife, could hope for freedom from distrust
and challenge. A soul, brave and tenacious as his was — so
sensitive to duty, and so resolute to do it — provoked injustice
not to be appeased, and dared reproaches which he might not
answer. His constitutional opinions were already part of the
recorded jurisprudence of the country, and he could not change
them because the tempest was howling. It was the convic-
tion of his life that the Government under which we lived
was of limited powers, and that its Constitution had been

ROGER BROOKE TANEY. 149

framed for war as well as peace. Though he died, there-
fore, he could not surrender that conviction at the call of
the trumpet. He had plighted his troth to the Liberty of
the Citizen and the Supremacy of the Laws, and no man
could put them asunder. Whatever might be the right of
the people to change their Government, or overthrow it, he
believed that the duty of the judges was simply to maintain
the Constitution, while it lasted, and, if need were, defend
it to the death. He knew himself its minister and servant
only — not its master — commissioned to obey and not to alter.
He stood, therefore, in the very rush of the torrent, and, as
he was immovable, it swept over him. He had lived a life
so stainless, that to question his integrity was enough to beg-
gar the resources of falsehood and make even shamelessness
ashamed. He had given lustre and authority, by his wisdom
and learning, to the judgments of the Supreme Tribunal, and
had presided over its deliberations with a dignity, impartiality
and courtesy which elevated even the administration of jus-
tice. Every year of his labors had increased the respect and
affection of his brethren and heightened the confidence and
admiration of the profession which looked up to him as
worthily its chief. And yet he died, traduced and ostra-
cised, and his image was withheld from its place in the
chamber which was filled already with his fame.

Against all this, the State of Maryland here registers her
protest in the living bronze. She records it in no spirit of
resentment or even of contention, but silently and proudly —
as her illustrious son, without a word, committed his reputa-
tion to the justice of his countrymen. Nor doubts she of the
answer that posterity will make to her appeal. Already the

150 ROGER BROOKE TANEY.

grateful manhood of the people has begun to vindicate itself
and him. Already, among those whose passion did him
wrong, the voices of the most eminent and worthy have
been lifted, in confession of their own injustice and in
manly homage to his greatness and his virtues. Already
the waters of the torrent have nearly spent their force, and
high above them, as they fall, unstained by their pollu-
tion and unshaken by their rage, stands where it stood, in
grand and reverend simplicity, the august figure of the
great Chief Justice !

ADDRESS

ON BEHALF OF THE

LEE MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION,

DELIVERED AT THE

ACADEMY OF MUSIC, BALTIMORE,

APRIL 10TH, 1875.

ROBERT E. LEE.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN :

THE ladies, at whose invitation you are here this even-
ing, have honored me by their command to state the
scope and purpose of the work in which they solicit you to
join them. But for the deference to which their wishes and
opinions are entitled, I should have ventured to believe the
task a needless one, for I am sure the feelings which induce
your presence have already spoken to you with a deep
impressiveness, to which I can add neither pathos nor
power. There are names which in themselves are a history
and a consecration — themes which are their own eloquent
interpreters beyond speech or writing — and who is there that
can add a word or a thought to the story, when, to those who
are around me, I name the name and call up the memory
of LEE?

More than four years have gone, since the great citizen
and soldier was called to his reward. He would, himself,
have coveted no prouder resting-place than the green bosom
of his mother State — no monument beyond the love and the
remembrance of the people he had loved and served. But
20 153

154 ROBERT E. LEE.

the gratitude and devotion of the living refused to be meas-
ured by the humility of the dead ; and it was at once deter-
mined, by his followers in arms, to mark the grave of their
illustrious leader by some fitting and permanent memorial.
An eminent sculptor of Richmond, Mr. Edward V. Valen-
tine, well known, by reputation, through the country, was
accordingly invited to assist in carrying out their wishes.
The choice was, in all respects, appropriate, the artist being
not only of unquestionable genius, skill and cultivation, but
full of enthusiasm in his art, and with that high sense of its
nobility and dignity, without which none can pass beyond
the outer places of its temple. These qualities existing in
the sculptor, it was doubly meet he should be chosen, so
that the tomb of the great Virginian should be modelled by
the reverent and loving hand of a son of the same mother.
Mr. Valentine's design of a recumbent figure of the hero,
was accepted by the Memorial Association in the early
summer of 1871, but the model was not finished in plaster
until late in the ensuing winter. The statue itself, which is
of marble, and of rather more than the size of life, received
the last touches of the chisel but a few days since, and was
exhibited to the public in Richmond, where it created the
profoundest sensation. It appears to have commanded the
admiration not only of the many, with whom devotion
might naturally have stood in the place of criticism, but of
those as well whose taste and culture entitle them to render
authoritative judgment.

The task of the sculptor was a difficult and grave one, but
he has shown himself equal to it. His conception and its
execution are severely simple. The hero is lying in his

ROBERT E. LEE. 155

uniform, as if in sleep, upon his narrow soldier's bed. His
posture is natural and easy. One hand is on his bosom,
and touches, unconsciously and gently, "the drapery of his
couch. " The other is lying by his side, where it has fallen,
and rests upon his sword. The portraiture is perfect, as to
form no less than feature. The whole expression is that of
tranquil and absolute repose. But it is not the sleep of
death and nothingness, when the soul is gone, nor yet of
bodily exhaustion, with its "dumb forgetfulness." It is
the repose of physical power, unshaken though dormant —
of manly grace, most graceful when at rest — of noble facul-
ties, alive and sovereign, though still. It is a presence in
which men stand, uncovered and in silence — half listening
for the voice — He " is not dead, but sleepeth."

The remains of General Lee were deposited and are now
resting beneath the chapel of Washington and Lee Univer-
sity, at Lexington, Virginia, in a chamber designed by him
for a library. The place is altogether unsuited for the monu-
ment proposed, which is to consist not only of the figure I
have attempted to describe, but of an appropriate sarcopha-
gus, in marble, on which the statue is to rest. There is
neither light enough nor sufficient elevation in the apart-
ment, which, in its style and appointments besides, is alto-
gether out of keeping with the work of the artist, and
unworthy to receive it. It has therefore been determined
to erect a separate and suitable memorial building or
mausoleum, upon ground which the University has placed
at the disposal of the Association, not far from the spot
where the great life it will commemorate was ended. In
this good work it is, that you are asked to share.

156 ROBERT E. LEE.

Apart from the wishes of the family of General Lee, who
desire that his remains shall lie in the peaceful and scholastic
shades to which he retired from the gratitude and admira-
tion of his people, there is eminent propriety in this selection
of his final resting-place. Had he died upon the field of
fame and battle, amid " the thunder of the captains and the
shouting " — had he gone home, victor in some crowning and
decisive fight, as he was victor in so many that were so very
glorious — it might have been well to lay him where men
come and go — a leader of men among men, still ruling their
spirits from his urn. — But such was not his death or fortune.
The calm, self-sacrificing, upright, unrepining gentleman —

"Who wore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted" —

humble before God and without enmity to men ; bending the
faculties that might have swayed a realm, to schemes of quiet
usefulness and unpraised toil ; silent before slander and insult ;
unmoved by threat and falsehood ; teaching, by noble precept
and example, the duty of submission, as he had nobly taught
and led resistance and defiance, while resistance was a duty —
this was the hero who died at Lexington, giving the lesson
of a greatness that was far above his glory. On the field
of that greatness he laid down his life, and on it he should
rest. To his fame it is nothing where he sleeps. To the
State that bore him — having borne him — it matters almost
as little. Could she have buried him at Arlington, as was
her right and his, she would have blended the memories of
Washington and Lee with the sacred associations of their
homes. At Lexington, their names at least are joined
together, and there the pilgrims from Mount Vernon to

EGBERT E. LEE. 157

the shrine your hands will help to build, may lay their
offerings on the grave of Jackson also.

WASHINGTON, LEE, JACKSON !

" dust,- which is
Even in itself, an immortality!"

There are before me, doubtless, some, who pay their will-
ing tribute to the great Confederate soldier, yet sympathize
in nothing with the cause to which he gave his heart and
genius. They see, in his career and character, those traits
which true men love and honor, no matter in what cause dis-
played. They share the admiration which his name awakens,
in the wise and brave and good, the wide world over. Their
pride grows warm and high, when they remember that they
are his brethren — that his fame will be the treasure of their
country and the heritage of their own children, so long as
they shall live in a free land and share its glories. It is in
the inspiration of this reverence for what is pure and noble —
the perpetual suggestion of this brotherhood and common
pride, the obliteration of animosities, the bringing of men's
hearts together, upon lofty common ground — that the memory
of the illustrious dead is a beneficent and living power. Its
influence, first felt by the bravest and the best of those who
were his foes, when swords were crossed, is now confined no
longer to party or to section. It has awakened magnanimity
and softened resentment almost everywhere. It has helped
to break the spell of prejudice and passion, and make men
feel how narrow, false and very mean a thing it is, to call
opinion crime. I look upon this influence as of the happiest

158 ROBERT E. LEE.

auguiy. I trust, nay, I believe the time is not far off,
when the great struggle, which ended at Appomatox, will be
regarded by the people of all America in the light of what
it was, and not of what violence and falsehood, in high places
and in low places, have found it their interest to call it. I
look for the returning sense of self-respect as well as justice,
in the country, to blot out from its laws and its judicial
decisions, not long hereafter, the opprobrious epithets by
which it is still the fashion to disgrace them, when the
Confederate war is mentioned. I persuade myself it will
not be long, before all intelligent and honorable men —
without abating one jot or tittle of their own convictions,
or of their honest pride in having fought victoriously to
maintain them — will begin to feel that the wearisome and
insulting cant about " rebels " and the " rebellion," and
"treason" and "traitors," is altogether unworthy of them,
and should be relegated to the pot-houses and their dema-
gogues. I know that such already is the feeling in hosts of
bosoms scarred in honorable fight, and it is a feeling that
must grow and spread, because it is just and manly, and
because manhood and justice are inherent in the race from
which we chiefly spring, and, though they may be reached
but slowly, sometimes, are certain to be reached at last.

Let me not be misunderstood. Of course no Southern man
has right or reason to complain of those who thought that
wrong, which he thought right. Believing that a separate
government was his plain right, when he might choose to
have it, he may not quarrel with the opposite convictions of
his countrymen, who thought, and with sincerity as deep as
his, that the Union was a priceless right of theirs, and were

EGBERT E. LEE. 159

therefore ready to immolate him for it, as well as sacrifice
themselves. But he has the right to ask that the honesty of
his convictions, the sincerity of his patriotism, the good faith
of his sacrifices, shall not be doubted or denied, any more
than theirs. He is entitled to demand that no enemy shall
put a tongue into his wounds — " poor, poor dumb mouths,"
and make them lie. It was melancholy beyond words, that
political differences between brethren — the citizens of a repub-
lic whose government rested on consent — could not be settled
without blood. But they were political differences neverthe-
less, and they were nothing more. They were the expression
of political principles, concerning which parties and sections
had been long divided, and which separated the best and
wisest of the land, long before their antagonism was startled
into strife. One side may have been right and the other
wrong, or there may have been right and wrong with both —
but neither could question, with truth, the sincerity of the
other; and only fanaticism and folly, upon either side can
deny it to the other, now. I speak of the true men, upon
both sides, for they only are worth considering, on either.
There is something marvellous, if not inconceivable, in the
belief which some people, otherwise sane, profess to enter-
tain, that a man is, mentally or morally, better or worse
for his sincere political opinions — better or worse because he
is a monarchist instead of a republican — because he favors
State rights or thinks them sinful ; that it was profligacy to
believe secession constitutional or in any way defensible, and
virtuous to believe the contrary ; that to be " loyal " was to
pass into the communion of saints, and to be " disloyal " was
to forfeit, in the act, the prestige of the loftiest and purest

160 ROBERT E. LEE.

life. While blood was hot and flowing, such madness might
have passed for reason. War over — ten years gone — it is
but drivelling folly, without the dignity of madness. And
yet to-day, this "clotted nonsense" (as Dr. Johnson would
have called it, in any body but himself) is standing or is
thrust in the way of justice, among thousands of honest and
good people; and, standing in the way of justice, is in the
way also of that perfect reconciliation and mutual trust,
which will never come, until justice shall be frankly done
by the victors to the vanquished. The men who fought in
the same cause with Lee, and all whose hearts were with
them, are bound in honor to abide by the arbitrament they
sought. They are bound to accept defeat and its legitimate
consequences, in as good faith as they would have accepted
victory. They are bound to obey the laws and support the
constitution ; to fulfil, to the letter, every duty of citizenship,
and answer freely every call of patriotic obligation. But
they are not bound to defile the ashes of their dead, or to
submit, in silence, to injustice or dishonor. They may have
been wrong. That is fair matter of opinion, and posterity
will judge them. They may have been unwise. There is
no absolute criterion, on earth, of what is wise; and none of
us have reason to think, like the friends of holy Job, that
we are the people, and that wisdom shall die with us. But
the men of the South are entitled to stand before mankind
as a people, who, believing they were right and acting with
what wisdom they knew, set hope and existence on the die.
They have a right to resent and denounce imputations on
their purposes and motives. When they read in political
journals and discourses, or hear, from the halls of legislation

ROBERT E. LEE. 161

or the bench of justice, that for eight millions of free-born
men to separate themselves from a popular government, of
which they formed a part, and set up and be governed by
another which they preferred, was " wicked rebellion " — an
effort to overthrow society and turn back the current of
civilization — they have a right to say that the time has
come, when educated people should be ashamed of such
things. They are the froth of the angry waters and should
have passed away with the storm. Until they cease to sully
the stream, the serenity of peace and brotherhood can never
be reflected, like heaven, from its bosom.

Such devices and phrases are not new. They are as old
as foolishness and foul language. I have before me a copy
which Mr. Parton has furnished, from a Tory " Extra " of
1777, chronicling the retreat of Washington across the Har-
lem River, and denouncing the cause in which he was enlisted
as "the most wicked, daring and unnatural rebellion that
ever disgraced the annals of history." The ingenuity and
eloquence of our own day, with all the modern improve-
ments, have not been able, I believe, to add a single epithet
to this pleasing expression of by-gone loyalty. And yet,
ten years after it was written, or at all events after the
Revolution was over, I am sure that all reasonable tories,
and certainly all sensible Englishmen, would have agreed
to laugh at it and forget it. We are ourselves about to
demonstrate, by a Centennial commemoration, how entirely
nature has recovered from the shock which that " rebellion "
was supposed to have given her. True, it was successful,
and that unquestionably makes some difference — but only
with time-servers. We are dealing, now, with moralists,
21

162 ROBERT E. LEE.

and they will never, I suppose, suggest that wickedness
ceases to be wicked, because the horn of the ungodly
happens to be exalted. If Grant had surrendered to Lee,
they would still have died in the conviction, that secession
was a heresy ; that the ways of Providence were inscrutable,
if not unconstitutional (according to Story's Commentaries) ;
and that truth and reason are not questions of numbers, artil-
lery or ammunition.

I make these observations here, in no spirit of unkindness
or contention. You would resent, and with justice, the intru-
sion of past or present controversial issues, upon an occasion
dedicated only to reverent and gentle memories of the dead.
But I feel, in common with all to whom those memories are
dear, that silence concerning such things as I have mentioned
is no longer consistent with proper self-respect. So long as
the bitterness of party can be profitably stirred by the worn-
out catch-words of the war, we must of course expect to hear
them from the lips of those to whom profit is a compensation
for shame. But we have a right to appeal from these to
the men who lead opinion, because they are worthy and
entitled to lead it. We have a right to throw upon them
the responsibility which belongs to their influence, their
intelligence, — nay, their breeding and their manners. And
for saying this, respectfully but earnestly and frankly, I
know no better occasion than the present, when we are
honoring one, who, though a " rebel " of " rebels," if there
were any such, was, by common consent, the soul of honor,
and than whom no man living dares to say that he or his
are purer or better. And, when I remember how his gener-
ous and unselfish nature would have scorned to place upon a

ROBERT E. LEE. 163

lower level than his own, the purposes and motives of the
humblest of the soldiers who gave all to the same cause
and the same country — living or dying, in defeat or victory,
half-naked in the field, half-famished on the march and
in the camp, but heroes always — I feel as if I did his
bidding, in this earnest protest against further maligning
their good name.

And here I am permitted, by the kindness of a friend, to
read some extracts from a letter of the illustrious soldier,
which has never seen the light before, and which will show
through what sad struggles, of both heart and mind, he passed
to what he felt to be his duty. I doubt not — nay, I know —
that many a gallant gentleman who fought beside him, and
many another in the opposing host, grieved, with as deep a
grief as Lee, to draw his sword. The letter that I speak of
bears the date of January 16th, 1861, and was written from
Fort Mason, near San Antonio, in Texas. It was addressed
to a young lady, a relative of his, for whom he had great
affection, and the passages of which I speak were written as
a message to her father. Alluding to the homes of two fami-
lies of friends, he said :

" I think of the occupants of both, very often, and hope,
some day, to see them again. I may have the opportunity
soon ; for, if the Union is dissolved, I shall return to Vir-
ginia to share the fortune of my people. But before so great
a calamity befalls the country, I hope all honorable means of
maintaining the Constitution and the equal rights of the peo-
ple will be first exhausted. Tell your father he must not
allow Maryland to be tacked on to South Carolina, before
the just demands of the South have been fairly presented to

164 ROBERT E. LEE.

the North and rejected. Then, if the rights guarantied by
the Constitution are denied us, and the citizens of one portion
of the country are granted privileges not extended to the
other, we can, with a clear conscience, separate. I ain for
maintaining all our rights, not for abandoning all for the
sake of one. Our national rights, liberty at home and
security abroad, our lands, navy, forts, dockyards, arsenals
and institutions of every kind. It will result in war T know,
fierce, bloody war. But so will secession, for it is revolution
and war at last, and cannot be otherwise, and we might as
well look at it in its true character. There is a long message,

A , for your father, and a grave one, which I had not

intended to put in my letter to you, but it is a subject on
which my serious thoughts often turn, for, as an American
citizen, I prize my government and country highly, and
there is no sacrifice I am not willing to make for their
preservation, save that of honor. I trust there is wisdom
and patriotism enough in the country to save them, for I
cannot anticipate so great a calamity to the nation as the
dissolution of the Union."

Alas ! alas ! that the hand which wrote those touching,
anxious words, was not near enough to the helm to avert
the shipwreck ! Alas ! alas ! that no voice should have been
lifted in the land, potent enough to bid the whirlwind stay !
Who lacked the wisdom — who lacked the patriotism — which
Lee invoked, it is not for me, in this place at least, to say.
If they existed, they were dumb and helpless, and the whirl-
wind came. But I have read enough to you, to show the
stuff of which some men were made whom they call " rebels "
— enough to show that they who fought, at last, against the

EGBERT E. LEE. 165

Union, were not always they who loved it least, or would,
least willingly, have died to save it.

I have spoken, Ladies and Gentlemen, of our hero's char-
acter and life, as they attract the admiration of mankind — of
the qualities which enemies and friends may venerate alike.
It would be unmanly affectation in me to pretend that, here
in Maryland, we loved him and remember him chiefly for
these. We are proud of the great name — as proud as any —
but the household word is dearer far to us. His story and
his memory are linked with all the hopes and triumphs, the
exultation and despair, which made a century of those four
bitter, bloody, torturing years. He was to us the incarna-
tion of his Cause — of what was noblest in it, and knightliest,
and best. Whatever of perplexity beset his path before he
chose it, he knew no doubts, when it was chosen. He fol-
lowed where it led him, knowing no step backward. Along
it, through victory and defeat, our sympathies and prayers
went with him. Around him gathered the fresh, valiant
manhood of our State, and many a brave young heart that
ceased to beat beside him, drew him but closer to the bleed-
ing hearts in all our saddened homes. These are the ties that
bind him to us. These are the memories that troop around
us here, to-night — not of the far-off hero, belonging to the
world and history — but memories of our hero — ours — the
man that wore the Gray ! Not in the valley where he
sleeps, not among the fields he made immortal, lives he,
or will he live, in fonder recollections, than where Calvert
planted freedom.

"And far and near, through vale and hill,
Are faces that attest the same;

166 ROBERT E. LEE.

The proud heart flashing through the eyes,
At sound of his loved name."

And when they tell us, as they do, those wiser, better
brethren of ours — and tell the world, to make it history —
that this, our Southern civilization, is half barbarism, we
may be pardoned if we answer : Behold its product and its
representative ! " Of thorns men do not gather figs, nor
of a bramble-bush gather they grapes." Here is Robert
Lee — show us his fellow !

ADDRESS

DELIVERED BEFORE

THE SCHOOLS OF ART AND DESIGN

MARYLAND INSTITUTE,

JUNE 4, 1881.

ART IN EDUCATION.

ME. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN :

ON the 13th day of March, 1851, at the request of the
Board of Managers of the Maryland Institute for
the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, I had the honor to
deliver the address at the laying of the corner-stone of the
edifice in which we are now assembled. It was an occasion
of great public interest, particularly manifested by the class
under whose auspices and for whose especial benefit the Insti-
tute was organized. There comes to me a refreshing odor as
of far-oif incense, when I read, from the newspaper reports
of the day following, that the speaker was " repeatedly inter-
rupted," during the delivery of his discourse, " by the applause
of his ten thousand listeners." The historical accuracy and
value of this part of the record may perhaps be slightly
qualified, in the opinion of some, by the statement which
immediately follows, that the "ten thousand" in question
" seemed to regret the close of the eloquent remarks " which
they are said to have applauded. Candor, indeed, compels
me to admit, for the benefit of rising orators, that such regrets
on the part of audiences have not been universal, in the some-
what extended experience of the speaker ; and, if the reporters
22 169

170 ART IN EDUCATION.

of that day were accurate, as I am bound to believe, in their
finding on the facts, it is only additional and striking evi-
dence of the public sympathy which attended the enterprise
then starting into life. There was, in truth, much enthusi-
asm among us all, at the time, and there were high and
confident hopes — shared fully by the speaker with his hearers
— that the institution, for which they were building a dwell-
ing place, would be prominent among the beneficent and
civilizing agencies by which our community was to be
elevated and developed. Of the conspicuous and valuable
citizens, who were the early friends and promoters of the
Institute and who manifested their interest in it by their
presence on the occasion, there are but few now left. The
able and energetic president of that day — the venerable Joshua
Vansant — is happily still among us, his capacity for usefulness
unimpaired by the labors of a long life of responsibility and
duty, most honorably met and faithfully discharged. My
friend and professional brother, Mr. John H. B. Latrobe,
whose varied and remarkable accomplishments and gifts seem
to grow brighter, from their constant and earnest application
to all purposes of practical utility, is still as active and assidu-
ous in the unpaid service of our people, as when he delivered
the address before the Institute, in 1848, at the opening of
its first annual exhibition at Washington Hall. But, when
I look over the list of the then officers and members of the
Institute, and see how little there remains of what constituted
its vitality and gave it its impulse in those days, I vividly
realize — what, indeed, the flight of thirty years sufficiently
suggests — that it is now face to face with the ideas and
demands, of not only a new generation, but a new and

ART IN EDUCATION. 171

different community. It provokes a smile to remember
with what innocent self-complacency we dwelt, in 1851,
upon the contrast between the wonderful Baltimore of that
day, and the Baltimore which had surrounded the place
where our corner-stone was laid, when it was simply a
marsh, in the memory of men then living. Nor were we
a whit less confident of the importance which was before
us, as a city, than proud of our superiority to the past.
We had great ideas of our prospects, and expressed them,
after the local and not altogether disused fashion, without
much diffidence. I am afraid that then, as now, we "dis-
counted " our greatness a little — as the phrase is — going into
debt to the future and to hope, without being as careful as
we might, to provide a sinking fund for the redemption of
our promises. Of course we have done wonders, since then,
as a city, but not half as many as we might have done, with
greater enterprise and more concentrated and united effort.
In spite of the surprising disclosures of our sesqui-centennial
celebration, our needs are yet many, and our efforts must be
great, if we would increase, or even maintain, the rate of our
progress. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that we have
provided, in one way or another, and with more or less com-
pleteness, for several of the necessities which cried aloud for
help when the Mechanics' Institute was founded.

Our admirable public school system now offers, with open
hands, to the mechanical classes, as to all others, the best
advantages of liberal, thorough and cheap education, with no
narrow limits. The bounty of the late Mr. Peabody has
given to our people, at the Institute which bears his name,
one of the noblest and amplest libraries of reference which

172 ART IJV EDUCATION.

can be found within the Union. A large and beautiful col-
lection of the best models of ancient sculpture is already on
exhibition in the halls at that Institute, and its department
of art, long dormant from deficiency of revenue, will soon be
in condition, it is hoped, to offer some opportunities to stu-
dents which the city has not hitherto afforded. Under the
endowment of the late Mr. Hopkins, a university has sprung
up recently among us, which is already marching to the front
among the great schools of the world. Quite apart from its
importance to the country and society at large, as an active
and productive agent in the increase and diffusion of human
knowledge, it has to us, as a community, a special and double
value, in the stimulus which its presence and influence have
given and must give to the intellectual tastes and habits of
our people. Of course, there will not be music everywhere,
simply because the God Pan is in the reeds. The mere pres-
ence of a great institution of learning cannot make a com-
munity learned or wise — though some excellent people appear
to think, or at all events to hope so, and seem disposed to sit
still, in their ascension-robes, and wait for the change. And
yet it cannot be but that an association of men of the highest
order of learning and ability, conscientiously and actively
devoted to the search after truth and knowledge, in every
department of human thought and inquiry, must perpetually
radiate something of the light and heat of their own spirit
and example into the intellectual atmosphere about them.
There is scarcely a man of intellectual turn among us who
has not felt this from the university, already, and welcomed
it with all his heart. I do not think it over-sanguine to
anticipate a time, not far removed, when this indirect influ-

ART IN EDUCATION. 173

ence of the Hopkins foundation — apart, as has been said,
from its direct impression as a teacher — will be traced,
among all classes of our citizens, in a higher and more
general appreciation of intellectual culture, and in habits of
more accurate and studious thought. When men are habit-
ually measured by a higher standard, they will come, in
time, to measure themselves by it ; and self-love will at last
suggest that reform which, intellectually at least (however
doctors may differ about it in politics), is always best and
surest, when it is spontaneous "within the party/' With
its large resources and bountiful equipment, the University
has thus provided for a want which the founders of the
Institute, in their most sanguine moments, could never have
hoped to meet, except in the most limited and special way.
It has provided further, by its courses of free lectures, for a
demand which the Institute at first endeavored to supply,
but to which its restricted means soon proved unequal. The
lectures at the Peabody Institute have also come liberally in
aid of the same purpose. The Mechanics' Institute of to-day
has, therefore, the advantage of a narrower field of obligation
than that which was before it when its duties were assumed.
But its obligations are none the less imperative because they
are fewer. Its capacity for usefulness has grown with its
ability to concentrate its means and efforts, and define and
simplify its aims.

For many years after its establishment, the annual fairs
or exhibitions of the Institute absorbed a good deal of its
energy — at first, with excellent results, but later on, without
great acceptance or much evidence of practical utility. Some
of them were very interesting and creditable displays, and

174 ART IN EDUCATION.

there were occasions when they brought together some of
the newest and cleverest inventions and most ingenious
mechanics of the country. But to make them generally
popular — or, perhaps, I should more accurately say — to
make them pay — there was a gradual departure from the
strict line of their mechanical specialty. It is mortifying
to admit, that in so large and thriving a community there
should have been a necessity for this, but, as I shall presently
take leave to observe, with more particularity, it was not an
unusual experience among us. It must be admitted that,
from the beginning, the Institute was wont to travel some-
what ambitiously, in its exhibitions, into the domain of what
was supposed to be "high art." The results, for the most
part, it is no unkindness now to say, were, perhaps, more
entertaining than instructive. I may be permitted, however,
to recall an incident, not altogether without interest and value
in its way, which shows that these little ostentations were in
the right direction and sometimes bore good fruit.

In November, 1851, the new hall of the Institute, in which
we are, was already sufficiently completed for the holding of
the yearly exhibition. It was then the largest edifice in the
whole country which was devoted exclusively to the advance-
ment of the mechanic arts. Under the impulse of the warm
and energetic feeling which had caused its erection, the first
exhibition held in it was so great and genuine a success that
it may well be remembered with pride. Among the objects
presented — " deposited," it was called — were a large number
which had been benevolently classified, in the catalogue, under
the head of " The Fine Arts." Of the committee of judges
on that class I had the undeserved honor to be chairman.

AET IN EDUCATION. 175

While considering, with mingled wonder and despair, the
multitude of hopeless aspirations after immortality, in paint
and canvas, with which they had to deal kindly, the com-
mittee had their attention attracted and their minds relieved
by a singular-looking little contribution, which was humble
enough in its pretensions and appeared to have been shelved,
in the background, by some one, who no doubt honestly
regarded that as the proper place for it. Upon examination,
we found that it was a copy, or rather, an imitation, in bas-
relief, of a well-known picture by Teniers. The material,
as well as I remember, was the building marble of Baltimore
county, and the entire work comprised frame as well as pic-
ture, in one piece. Although the treatment was not very
skilful, and the material did not lend much attraction to the
sculptor's modest effort, it required but a glance, to see that
the longing and the aspiration of the artist were there, and
that there was promise of a name and a future in the touch
of the untrained hand. Upon inquiry, we found that it was
the work of a young and unknown mechanic in the city, a
journeyman stone-cutter, who was altogether without artistic
education or the means of acquiring it. It was not in the
power of the committee to do more than encourage the
ambition which the Institute had no means of fostering;
but we did our best, by rendering the judgment which I
take leave to read you, from the contemporary records of
the Institute.

" No. 801. The work, which, in our judgment, possesses
the highest degree of artistic excellence, among those admitted
to competition, is the bas-relief, in marble, from Teniers'
' Smokers/ cut and deposited by Mr. William H. Rinehart.

176 ART IN EDUCATION.

The committee consider the artist as entitled to the most
favorable notice and the highest reward."

Immediately following, on the record, is the action of the
Committee on Awards :

"801. William H. Rinehart, at Mr. Baughman's, for a
basso-relievo in marble from Teniers' f Smokers/ gold medal."

I had not the honor of a personal acquaintance with Mr.
Binehart until long after, when he was at the height of his
reputation, and as near the zenith of his delightful genius as
life permitted him to reach. It was after he had returned to
his home, in 1872, to erect at Annapolis, under a commission
from his native State, his noble statue of our great Chief-
Justice. Circumstances threw me into close relation with
him, which soon led to cordial friendship, and in the freedom
of our intercourse I one day said to him, that we had been
acquaintances longer than he knew. When I gave him the
explanation, which he asked, he manifested the deepest sensi-
bility, and told me, with much emotion, that it was impossi-
ble for me fully to appreciate the influence of the simple
incident which I recalled, upon his hopes and his career. It
was, he said, the earliest public recognition of his right to
believe that there was something in him, and he owed more
than he could express, to the pride and encouragement it gave
him, in his poverty and toil. I confess that, ever since, I
have ceased to think of the " fine arts " of the older Institute,
with the levity which they once inspired. Whole acres of
bad canvas were worth enduring — nay, even worth exhibit-
ing— for the sake of that one tender shoot of genius, watered
in its struggle with the clods.

AET IN EDUCATION. 177

And this brings me to the more practical considerations
which belong to the present occasion, and which I trust you
will pardon my delay in reaching.

In the allusions which have just been made to the art
exhibitions of the Institute in former years, it has, of course,
been as far as possible from my purpose or disposition, to
disparage such displays when made under proper conditions.
But art, without school and teaching, is in all its forms the
most baseless of fabrics ; and the necessity of labor, which is
the first lesson to be taught, brings with it, as its universal
concomitant, the obligation to wait. To offer general encour-
agement to the display of crude and uneducated effort, is
perhaps the most effective method, in most cases, of stifling
what might be talent, by submerging it in the pleasant and
perfumed waters of self-satisfaction. Nothing need be said,
I am sure, of the effect which is likely to be produced upon
the unformed artistic tastes of a community, by the distribu-
tion of prizes which must go, for lack of better, to works
which have their only merit from comparison with others
that are worse. It was not, however, for want of good
intentions, or of knowing how they should be carried out,
that the Institute failed, for so many years, in this part of
its purposes. Teachers and schools are not, in all respects
at least, like those exquisite plants we know of, which blos-
som and are fragrant on no better diet than the air. It is
idle and absurd to calculate upon producing noteworthy
results in art education, or in education of any sort, with
scanty means. There must be good and abundant models,
and all sufficient materials and appliances, in the hands of
competent teachers, who are paid what their ability and use-
23

178 ART IN EDUCATION.

fulness deserve, so that they may dedicate their whole time
and talents to their work, and do it with all their might.
Individual poverty, of course, can only do the best it may,
but public institutions, which assume a duty to the public
and are expected to discharge it, cannot live upon half
rations. It is our duty, as we all know, and it makes us
better, to pray and be thankful for our daily bread; but a
sad heart and a weary mind must come from always thinking
of it. And so it is, with institutions like that with which
we are concerned to-night. If gentlemen are willing, as their
officers, to give time and service, without reward, to the
public interests which they promote, it is the duty of the
public to meet them half way. They ought not to be
hampered by inadequate resources, or disheartened by the
vain effort to accomplish their work with only half the
necessary tools. Their teachers, I repeat, should be liber-
ally, and in all contingencies fairly, provided for. Their
pupils should be tempted to labor and learn, by all the
facilities and appliances which make such labor a delight
and give to it speed and progress. They should never, for
an instant, be kept down from excellence, by lack of example
or of guidance, or of help to reach it. Neither officer nor
teacher nor pupil should have his hands tied, or even
hindered, in his work, by mean economies. It is because
the Institute has never been thus favored — or, to speak more
properly, because, in this regard, it has never been fairly dealt
with — that it has fallen so far short, from time to time, in the
attainment of what was hoped from it by its founders.

It is in view of this, that the admirable exhibition which
we are now closing is so much a marvel, and that all to

ART IN EDUCATION. 179

whom we owe it are so much entitled to the thanks of the
community. I call it admirable, not for the sake of saying
a pleasant and a kindly thing, for I should have no right to
say it here, even as a compliment, unless it were deserved. It
is not that the works exhibited are perfect, or pretend to be.
It is not so much that the order of their excellence is high,
although the merit of many of them is undoubtedly remark-
able. It is that study and care and progress are visible in
almost all of them, and conspicuous and striking in many.
It is that they afford indisputable proof of thorough and
skilful teaching, and excellent and general capacity to learn.
It is impossible, I think, for any man, with an intelligent
appreciation of such things, to have examined the specimens
exhibited, without having his interest in the Institute deepened
and his desire to serve it excited. And these specimens, too,
are not " deposits " — as in former days — the efforts of ambi-
tious exhibitors. They are the school's own daily, actual
work, as it comes from the hands of its pupils. They are
the showing of what two years have done for it, under many
disadvantages, and of how much more and better it could do,
if its hands were strengthened as they should be.

When I said, a few moments ago, that the experience of
the Institute, in this latter particular, was not a novelty in
Baltimore, it was with regret, but with a strong conviction
that the truth on that subject, whether flattering, or agree-
able, or the contrary, ought to be spoken plainly and without
reserve, on an occasion like the present. The imputation of
presumption, which may possibly attach to speaking it, should
not hinder its utterance by any man who is fit to be heard.
The truth then, undoubtedly, is, that the past history of

180 AET IN EDUCATION.

Baltimore, and indeed of Maryland, has not been one of
liberality to institutions of benevolence, or education, or
general usefulness. I do not speak of legislative or muni-
cipal liberality, nor is either in my mind. I speak of
individual liberality — of the willingness of our citizens to
contribute, of their own means, and according to their means,
to such institutions as I have described — institutions which
cannot be used for patronage, for power, or for influence, and
from which he who gives them endowment can expect no
other return, than that which comes to him in common with
the rest of the community. Until of late years, it is true that
we have had among us but few really great fortunes. Even
now, the number is of course far smaller in Baltimore than
in many other cities — less, in fact, than in several of its own
class and population. But the community has always been
a prosperous one, when it chose to be ; and no one remem-
bers the time when there were not rich men among us, who
had abundance and to spare. It is a city of very large wealth
to-day, and there is great ability to give, among its people —
supposing, always, the desire to give. And yet we can readily
count, upon our fingers, all the large endowments which have
ever been bestowed upon public institutions in Baltimore.
One would be sorry to think, and should be slow to believe,
that this has arisen from a greater unwillingness to part with
money than exists elsewhere. In many ways, our people are
proverbially free-handed, and we all know how prodigally,
at times, their money has followed their sympathies. Their
backwardness in the matter to which I am referring arises
very obviously, it seems to me, from other causes. They
have never sufficiently appreciated the value and force of

ART IN EDUCATION. 181

co-operative effort, even in their business enterprises. Their
energies have almost always taken an individual direction.
Without reproaching them with too strict an adherence to the
Franklinian religion of " every man for himself/7 it cannot
be denied that their method has too generally been that of
" every man by himself." And so, in those matters of public
utility, apart from business and profit, which are committed
elsewhere to institutions especially organized and endowed,
they have been guided by the same false principle, and
have fallen into the same unwise and unprogressive prac-
tice. Indeed, a closer analysis would most probably demon-
strate that it is matter of habit, mainly, and that neither
principle nor calculation has much to do with it. But what-
ever it be, and whatever it may cost our pride to be frank
about it, it is provincial altogether, and not metropolitan. It
is pardonable in a village or a town, but is unworthy of a
great and prosperous community, with such capabilities and
such a possible future as ours. It becomes us to know, and
to act as if we knew, that there are some things of largest
import to us, outside and beyond our daily work and busi-
ness, for which we must not lean on legislation, and which
we cannot trust to individual zeal and unorganized effort.
The subject is one of large scope, in itself and its suggestions,
but this is not the place to deal with it, except in so far as it
touches the special occasion.

While, however, we assume, upon the one hand, that it is
the duty of the citizen — a duty coupled with his broadest and
best interests as such — to promote and give his aid to public
institutions which have large public and social purposes to
serve, it must be conceded, on the other, that he has the right

382 ART IN EDUCATION.

to scrutinize and be satisfied before he gives. Every organ-
ization which calls for public support is bound to show cause
why it should exist and be kept alive, and it is because this
Institute has no fear of such challenge, that I speak so earn-
estly for it to-night. I have already endeavored to show how
and why its aims and purposes have grown fewer and more
definite, in the progress of time. At present, the clever,
indefatigable men by whom it is directed have wisely con-
fined their efforts, for the most part, to its development as a
school of art and design, with chief and especial reference to
instruction in industrial art. There was a time, doubtless,
in the memory of some of us, when argument might have
been required, to satisfy a promiscuous audience, anywhere
in the United States, that art, in any of its applications or
departments, was other than a dilletanteism at best, if not a
wasteful luxury. Mr. DuMaurier's "Cimabue Browns/7 if
they had been known in that day, would have been pretty
generally accepted as the genuine type of all art worshipers.
Even the word " aBsthetics," however, had not then been
invented. Many of us can remember when an American
crowd, on the most jubilant occasions, was indeed very dis-
mal as to its raiment, and when the bright and charming
colors, with which beauty, like the earth and sky, now makes
itself more beautiful and us more thankful, were looked on,
even by those who were no Puritans, with some suspicion
of the "Scarlet letter." Happily, however, that geological
period has passed. Art is now everywhere — in the gallery
of the man of taste and wealth ; in the public edifice and the
private dwelling ; in the fabrics that we wear, the books that
we read and the furniture that we use — in the show-fronts of

ART IN EDUCATION. 183

the shops, the handbills and circulars of trade, and the very
placards on the street corners. The Christmas toy-book of
your children is now a work of genius. There is a world of
grace and beauty under Kate Greenaway's window, which
would have dazzled the whole " growing infancy " of the first
half of the century. Much more of genuine art is in the cast-
ings of a poor man's stove, to-day, than hung, begilt, upon
the walls of many a rich man's dwelling, in years we can
recall. The " trumpet-muzzled " pitcher, or ewer, of past
times, which we may see, even yet, in the grimy repose of
the second-hand furniture shops, is now supplanted, in the
humblest of our homes, by a vase, which, though it be of the
cheapest and coarsest material, has all the lines of Grecian or
Etruscan grace. The commonest utensils of our household
service have now a beauty of form and of color, which were
once taken to be possible only in things of great price.
Think of the decorations of our public conveyances, and
conceive, if you can, on what prophetic soul the dream of
an Eastlake coach could have dawned, in the days when
our corner-stone was laid. What gardener would then have
dared to frighten a lawn or a terrace from its propriety, by
painting his flower tubs bright scarlet ? Some unprincipled
person once undertook to classify the practice of the law as
one of the " arts of design." However that may be, it cer-
tainly was not a decorative art, when I first knew it. In
the office of the lawyer, as in the counting-room of the mer-
chant, the prime object seemed to be, to exclude everything
which might suggest that the occupants could possibly have
a taste of any description. They went as near as could be to
Tom Paine's libel on the Society of Friends — that if they

184 ART IN EDUCATION,

had had the coloring of creation, they would have made it
all drab. We have got the better of that greatly nowadays,
I am glad to say ; and there are merchants and lawyers both,
who are unlike the old time children of Israel, in this, at
least, that they do not " make them dens."

All this means something, I fancy. It does not mean that
we are a people of artists. It is very far from meaning that
we have learned to know art and to judge it as only they who
know it can. But it does mean that to a people who, in their
struggle with the wilderness, thought only of conquering it,
and, in their struggle for predominance and wealth, thought
only of winning them, there has come, in the hour of their
greatness and success, a revelation of the beauty and splen-
dor which may illuminate and glorify this work-day world.
They may still testify their sense of these imperfectly and
poorly ; they may accept the false, for a time, and think it
true ; but the day at least of their insensibility and uncon-
sciousness, is over. What contented them once will content
them no longer. They have learned that the senses have
pleasures, of the simplest sort, which elevate and refine, and
the delight of those pleasures they will not forego. If they
cannot have the best art, they will have the best they can,
and for them, henceforward, the hand of the artisan must
catch a spark from the hand of the artist. Whether this is
a blessing, or is not, is a question which I should be ashamed
to discuss. But whatever else it be, it is a fact, and must be
dealt with as such. The only practical question is whether
we can afford to despise it. Can we let our people go
untaught of the arts of construction and design, when all
the sister communities with which we rank ourselves are

ART IN EDUCATION. 185

straining every nerve to teach them? Are the mechanic
arts so small an element in our prosperity, that we can
safely let them run or rust in the worn-out grooves of thirty
years ago? When the demand all around us is for skilled
workmen, are we to settle down to workmen without skill ?
Are the people who are born to the necessity of labor, to
be furnished with no means of lightening and refining it?
Do the best we may, we can never dispense altogether with
the proletary and the drudge ; but, in Heaven's name, let us
help him, if we can, to the means of being something better —
let us make the hewers of wood and drawers of water as few
as may be. This is not only the duty of a republican and
Christian community, but its best interest as well. Think
of the weariness that will be lightened by art-labor, to those
who are weak and yet must toil. Think of the penniless and
helpless women, who will have pleasant and congenial work,
away from rude contact and piteous temptation. Think of
the young men of poor estate, whose tastes will be developed,
whose natures will be refined, and to whom avenues of inde-
pendence, and perhaps distinction, will be opened. Can any
man look another in the face and say that these things are
not to be coveted? And yet, how shall we attain them?
The children of toil cannot educate themselves. Of the
many even to whom work brings comfort, it brings the
means of but little more. As maturity comes on, the son
takes up the father's tools, and his education, for the most
part, ends. What the workshop teaches him, more or less
rudely, he learns, and little else. Unless some one helps him
to improvement and development, it is only exceptionally
that he ever reaches them. Individual help may serve in
24

186 ART IN EDUCATION.

individual cases, it is true ; but a large and public need can
only be supplied by public effort and the public hand.

Now, what has this community attempted in that direc-
tion ? Macaulay reports Sir William Maule as wont to say,
that " private schools make poor creatures and public schools
sad dogs." But what of no schools at all ? In this city of
ours and this year of grace, there is not one single public
academy of art, of any sort, except that within whose almost
naked walls we are. The elementary instruction in drawing
which is given in our public schools, is necessarily limited,
and a large portion of the pupils are compelled to leave them
at an early age, as the report of the commissioners explains,
in order to learn trades for their future support. There is
no public institution where mechanical, or architectural, or
decorative drawing, or drawing or modelling from nature or
from casts, is pretended to be thoroughly taught, and espe-
cially to adults. That there is no place of public instruction
in the use of colors, in water or in oil, goes without saying.
In fact, the want of sufficient and capable teachers is as con-
spicuous and natural, as the want of encouragement and occu-
pation for them. The ladies of the Decorative Art Society,
with commendable zeal and excellent success, have done their
best in the good work, but they stand almost entirely alone
within their limited sphere. The great mass of the wealth
and influence of the community keeps aloof and gives no help.
I will not ask whether this is creditable. Is it tolerable?
But for the recent grant of a small annual appropriation, by
the wise liberality of our municipal government, the means
for the late display by the Institute — the means, indeed, of
making that display possible — would not have been within

ART IN EDUCATION. 187

its reach. Successful as this has been — standing as the Insti-
tute does, among the largest organizations of its class in the
country, both as to the number of its pupils and the extent of
its work — it is painful to contemplate the scanty resources by
which the ability and energy of its officers and teachers have
been held in check. One almost blushes to see the small
array of borrowed and battered casts to which the pupils
have been confined, in drawing and modelling after the
antique. Of objects of art which would instruct their eyes
and keep alive and stimulate their perception and sense of
beauty in form and color, there are none to speak of. There
is little or nothing to create the atmosphere in which alone
art can draw its freest breath. Nor is this all. Of the day
pupils there are comparatively few of the class who live
entirely by their own labor. The necessity of supporting
themselves keeps constantly away large numbers of female
pupils, to whom the school would be most desirable and use-
ful, and to whom night attendance is not permissible. In
looking at the excellent and promising work of the night
classes, it is touching, to any one of sensibility, to think that
the young men who have produced it have done so at the
expense of their rest and recreation, after long days of toil
for bread. What a benevolence it would be, on the part of
any man who could afford it, to lay the foundation of a fund
by which the more promising and poorer of these young men
and women might be assisted, while they learned what the
Institute could teach them. How much of gratitude a rich
man would deserve, not only from the institution and its
pupils, but from every man and woman in our limits, if he
would endow a museum of industrial art, connected with

188 ART IN EDUCATION.

the Institute — a standing exposition of the capabilities and
methods and triumphs of skilled and educated labor ! In
all the leading European nations, and in many of the States
and cities of America, these collections are the noblest and
most effective effort of the last quarter of a century, in the
application of art to industry. The museum is treated as the
necessary adjunct of the school, and together they teach not
only the artisan, the artist and the citizen, but the teachers
more than all. In the ample and admirable report of a spe-
cial committee appointed by this Institute, and in a memorial
address by its managers to the General Assembly of Mary-
land at its last session, this subject is treated with a fulness
and intelligence which leave nothing to be said ; and I could
wish that some of those who have the means to gratify the
impressive suggestions of those able papers, would take the
thing manfully to heart.

Is there no mechanic in all Baltimore, made rich by merit
and labor in his calling, who has pride enough in it to dedi-
cate some portion of his earnings to its elevation and improve-
ment ? Can it be that there is not one such, who remembers
the difficulties of his own early manhood — the hard conflict
between his desires and his opportunities, between his ambi-
tion to learn and his lack of means of instruction ? Remem-
bering these, can any such man hesitate to give something
out of his abundance, to remove from the paths of others the
thorns which beset his own? If prosperous industry has
relieved him from the necessities and taken him out of the
working ranks of his class, can he fail to have a grateful
sense of what he owes it, or to feel that he will best pay
his debt to it and to the community which fostered him, by

ART IN EDUCATION. 189

giving a helping hand to those of his own people who are
wrestling too hard with poverty to look up for light? Is
there no merchant — no other man of business — in Baltimore,
who feels sufficiently the strength of the tie between capital
and labor, to recognize the dependence of the one upon the
manhood, the intelligence, the elevation of the other ? Can
such men fail to know how their endowment of such an
institution as this, with their money and their sympathy, in
the interest of mechanical culture and development, would
strengthen those ties and sweeten that dependence? I know
how easy it is to indulge in that most delightful form of
benevolence — the giving away or counselling the gift of other
people's money. We have all known many good people, who
were so well satisfied with dispensing that sort of bounty,
that they were content to live and die without being ostenta-
tious of any other. Whatever reproach, therefore, of that
sort, the suggestions I have made are open to, I must accept.
Let me protest, however, that the endowments which I have so
earnestly counselled would involve no very enormous draught
upon the treasures of the community. We learn, from the
report of Provost Morison, that the cost of the superb col-
lection of casts presented by Mr. Garrett to the Peabody
Institute has thus far fallen short of fifteen thousand dollars.
The foundations of an art museum, in this Institute, might
be laid at comparatively small expense. Loans to it would
follow, when a place was made for them, and liberal gifts
would follow loans. The beginning of a fund in aid of
poorer pupils need not be large. Once set, the good exam-
ple of such giving would be followed. One man's attention
would be attracted by what excited the sympathy and warmed

190 ART IN EDUCATION.

the benevolence of another. Every one who gave would feel
an interest in the object of his bounty, if for no better reason
than Sterne gives, when he says that we water a weak flower
because we have planted it.

I have already trespassed so long upon your patience, that
a single further suggestion will end my appeal to your indul-
gence. It has long been my own conviction, that one of the
most direful needs of education, in this State, is the establish-
ment of a technical school for scientific, mechanical instruction.
There is absolutely nothing of the sort upon the soil of Mary-
land— a blot upon the intellectual and, indeed, the business
record of a community, whose productive and mechanical
capacity is so large and varied as our own. The class for
whom such instruction is needed are the very class who
cannot afford to seek it at a distance, and, except out of
Maryland, no Maryland man can find it. Every one, who
is at all familiar with the subject, knows that in all the large
enterprises where mechanical agencies are needed, the demand
is now for mechanics — not only skilled, but thoroughly and
scientifically educated. The so-called " practical man " —
whose knowledge is simply empirical, and whose facts lie
isolated in a vacuum — is being pushed fast to the wall. He
is a victim of the survival of the fittest. Our mechanics are
at a sad disadvantage, from the absence of opportunity to
qualify themselves for this new order of things. An honor-
able and lucrative profession, which may well be classed
among those best deserving the appellation of "learned," is
thus practically closed to a large number of the most vigorous
intellects of our state. I have heard with great satisfaction,
that it is proposed to convert the ancient foundation of St.

ART IN EDUCATION. 191

John's College, at Annapolis, into a technological school.
But, as that depends upon the legislative will, and as the
ways of legislatures are in the depths of the sea — and often
in many other depths — I look upon this project with more
of hope than of confidence. A liberal private endowment of
such a department, in connection with the Maryland Institute,
would fill up the measure of its already exceeding usefulness,
while it liberated the mechanical education of our people from
the caprices of the General Assembly. As the Masons said,
when the corner-stone was laid — " So mote it be ! "

A I> J3RESS

DELIVERED AT THE

EIGHTH ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT

McDoNOGH INSTITUTE,

JUNE 3, 1882.

JOHN MCDONOGH.

"TVT EARLY forty years ago, as I stood upon the wintry
JL i banks of the Mississippi river, a short distance above
New Orleans, waiting with a friend for the ferry, I saw a
skiff approaching from the other side. It contained a single
passenger, whose appearance, as he landed and carne near me,
attracted and fixed my attention. As I remember him, he
was a singular-looking old man, tall, gaunt, erect, and of
strongly-marked features, with an expression of much force
and more austerity. He carried a very large and plethoric
umbrella, like that which we are all so familiar with, as the
companion of Mrs. Gamp and the " unprotected female." He
was dressed in a clean but well-worn, if not threadbare, suit
of black, with a close-bodied coat and white cravat, looking
very much like a somewhat ascetic country clergyman, ill
supported by his parish. I give you the type, because it is
unfortunately familiar enough to be readily recognized, it
being strangely true, that the prohibition against muzzling
the ox which treadeth out the corn, appears to be least appre-
ciated in the rural districts, where one would think that its
application would be best understood. As however, the ox
has given way to the threshing-machine, which does not eat,

195

196 JOHN McDONOGH.

perhaps the modified analogy may be supposed applicable to
the parson. My companion — to return to my narrative —
perceiving that the stranger whom I have described was an
object of curiosity to me, enquired if I did not know who
he was, and upon my replying in the negative, told me that
he was John McDonogh, one of the wealthiest citizens of
Louisiana, and a man of singularly eccentric habits, some of
which he described. Mr. McDonogh's appearance, as I have
said, though quite consistent with eccentricity, gave certainly
no evidence of riches; and, upon expressing my surprise at
the wealth ascribed to him, I was informed that he was an
extremely close and penurious man — in fact, to be plain — a
confirmed and notorious miser. Not taking much personal
interest in that sort of people, it is probable that I should
never have thought again of Mr. McDonogh, had I not seen,
some five years afterwards, the announcement of his death
and of the noble and unexpected purposes to which, by a will
prepared long before I saw him, he had dedicated the hoard-
ings of his lifetime. The picture, which I have endeavored
to draw for you, came back to me, then, upon the instant,
with all the freshness of the first impression ; and I have the
scene upon the river shore as vividly before me now, with
John McDonogh, " in his habit as he lived," as if years and
changes and war and misery had not swept in between, as
dark and pitiless as the waters by whose rush we stood.
Least of all things, as you may well imagine, did it occur
to me, when I saw the old man, for the first and last time,
and heard of him only as a greedy niggard, that here, to-day,
a thousand miles from where I left him and after more than
a third of a century, I should be standing, amid the ripening

JOHN McDONOGH. 197

fruits of his benevolence and foresight, to praise the goodly
works which have lived after him to bless him.

It is not, after all, a barren commonplace, to say that the
best, and oftentimes — although not always — the most endur-
ing record of remembrance, is that which is written on men's
hearts. That the hope and desire of such remembrance was
a warm and moving impulse in the Founder of this Institute
is plain, from the touching request, in his will — the "little
favor " as he humbly calls it — that the children of his schools
should be permitted, every year, " to plant and water a few
flowers" around his resting place. But if, beyond this
natural yearning for the human sympathy of which he had
sought so little while he lived — this desire to prolong, through
all the summers of the coming years, those

" Pious thoughts, which visit, at new graves,
In tender pilgrimage — "

he felt, in his loneliness and isolation, the longing after that
" Resurrection in the minds of men,"

with which few pulses are too dull to throb, he could not
easily have built for himself a monument, from which his
name would be less likely to crumble than this beneficent
Foundation.

Where large benevolence is the spontaneous outpouring of
a habitual and natural impulse, there is nothing to say of it
but words of love and praise. But it is a curious problem,
to students of human nature — this prodigal giving of large
gifts, by men whose lives have been spent in the hungry and
eager pursuit of accumulation ; men, for whose greed no gains

198 JOHN McDONOGH.

were too petty, for whose savings no mite was too small. We
look upon it, almost with the wonder and perplexity of the
fisherman in the Arabian story, when, out of the paltry copper
vessel which he held in his hands, there rose and took form
before him a genie, " twice as high as the greatest of giants."
And yet the phenomenon is frequent enough for us to be
assured that it has a fixed and certain basis in the constitution
of humanity. Its attendant circumstances generally teach us
that, like almost everything which springs from human motive,
it is as apt to have its roots in the weakness as in the strength
of our nature. Of course, it is hardly worth while to discuss
the liberality which merely gives away what the giver can
no longer keep, or what, if kept, he cannot enjoy. In the
latter case, nevertheless, he has to overcome the desire of keep-
ing and the pride and power of possession, which, although
hardly to be called enjoyment, are full of the elements of
passionate selfishness and self-assertion. To a man in the
vigor of life, or even in the decline of an active and domi-
nant career, the temptation is almost irresistible, to postpone
till the last moment the surrender of what he has striven and
lived for, and what chiefly makes the influence and power he
is accustomed to and covets. Analysing the processes by which
that temptation is so frequently and conspicuously overcome,
it is bewildering to note how often the very forces which
spring from self are those by which its more grovelling
tendencies are met and counteracted. Ambition — the very
ostentation of riches — the pride, instead of the joy, of giv-
ing— the poor desire of notoriety — even simple vanity — all
have their part sometimes, in the good work. This, per-
haps, is only saying, with all deference to the great poet,

JOHN McDONOGH. 199

that we are more than " half dust," and very far from being
" half Deity ; " that all, except the most privileged natures,
will feel the spur or the clog of their human frailty, even
when their faces are turned and their path is towards the
heights. In spite, too, of it all, when conscious weakness
begins to prop itself upon unselfish endeavor ; when ambition
is willing to pale its fires in the simplicity of doing good ;
when pride, ostentation, vanity — all the multitudinous streams
and undercurrents of self-seeking — are content, no matter why
or how, to flow into channels undefiled, it is impossible to
help feeling and rejoicing that the waters may be living
waters, though they be not free from the stain and the taste
of earth. And if we find that the man, in the midst of his
getting and his hoarding, has quietly dedicated a part of his
life and his best reflections to the good which he has contem-
plated ; that alone, in the silence of his own thoughts, he has
set himself to work it out — narrowly, and in a poor and half
enlightened way, if you please, but still with all his heart,
according to his lights — we are compelled to realize that the
higher purpose has got the better of the lower impulse, and
that the motives have been transfigured into the work and
glorified. The man himself has grown, and has grown
better, before our eyes, with the growth of his resolve.
The very aim at something higher than his daily level has
lifted his sight upward, and his nature has gone up with it,
as he looked. He may have wrapped himself in discounts
and percentage till his own last day of grace came round,
and his grade among his kind may have been the lower for
his traffic, but, at least, he has recognized something out-
side of it and of himself, and, if he has not broken his

200 JOHN McDONOGH.

chains, he has at last prevented the iron from entering
altogether into his soul.

These considerations are not suggested, here, by way of
apology for the life of our Founder or as qualifications of the
gratitude which enshrines his memory. But, upon occasions
like this, when every man who speaks is, in some sort, a
teacher, it is not becoming that the moral of the teaching
should be open to misconstruction. It is not meet that the
sense and acknowledgment of obligation, the grateful tribute,
the affectionate remembrance, should wear the seeming of
homage to wealth, or of indiscriminate reverence for those
who have gathered it, merely because they have at last dis-
pensed it. At the same time, it were invidious and unworthy
to stand in the light of a dead man's bounties and dissect too
keenly the hand which bestowed them. The true line lies
between respect for the dead and respect for ourselves. The
honest lesson to be taught is that which the life truly teaches.
It is a lesson to be studied in charity and yet not blindly ;
not to be learned, on the one hand, from the covetousness
which gathered, nor, on the other, from the generosity which
gave, but from the man's entire career, as a revelation of
himself — of how he wrestled with his nature and was over-
come by it or overcame it.

The fact is, that people generally expect too much, from
those whom they desire, or are asked, to think well of or to
praise. Men who fill a large place in the world and are
high in the ranks of its greatness, are apt to be raised by the
popular enthusiasm to an impossible standard, or misjudged
by popular disappointment, because they do not come up to
it. If Washington had been as he is generally described and

JOHN McDONOGH. 201

regarded, he would, of course, have been a model of all the
virtues, and of all the proprieties as well, but a very wooden
model, notwithstanding — a lay figure, as it were, among the
immortals. The popular reverence for him has almost made
him less than man, in its effort to make him more. The
idea of the Father of his Country, as he was, with the
temptations and frailties, the temper and passions of com-
mon men, would take away the breath of half his worshippers
among the multitude. They forget that he belonged to the
line of heroes and not of demigods, and that his greatness
was in his very manhood. It is only on the stage — they
should remember — that the kings of men fight their battles
in crowns and coronation robes, as we have seen Richard
fight on Bos worth field. As people judge the great ones of
the earth, so do they judge its humbler benefactors and each
other. They expect a character to be all of a piece — a great
man to be always great — a liberal man to be always gener-
ous— a mean man to be always mean — a great general to be
always, as it were, on horseback. There can be no wilder
misconception than this, of human character. We are full
of antagonisms which never counteract each other, and of
inconsistencies which will not submit to be averaged. There
is no such thing as deducting our moral debits from our
moral credits, or vice versa, and getting at the net balance.
If our mental and moral constitution were like an algebraic
equation, where equal opposite quantities cancel each other
and can be stricken out, human nature would be, indeed, a
comparatively simple study. But, unhappily, its rules do not
work in that way. It is not a matter of plus and minus
merely. Our qualities run, as it were, in separate grooves,
26

202 JOHN McDONOQH.

each in its own direction. They cross each other rudely,
sometimes, and check each other frequently, for good or
for ill, but they seldom agree to combine or compromise
and run together.

Humanity, in action, is perpetually stumbling over itself,
when there is nothing else to obstruct it. Half the time it
is in its own way. It constantly thwarts its own best pur-
poses and disappoints its own firmest resolves. So too, upon
the other hand, it sometimes starts into unexpected virtue or
greatness, for a while, from very shame at its own littleness —
happy if it does not relapse, as suddenly, into littleness, when
it counts the cost. The follies and blunders of great and wise
men are among the chief warnings of history. The backslid-
ings of good men point many of its saddest morals. An
ingenious Spanish poet goes so far as to develop, in a clever
epigram, his preference for the ignorance of the learned over
the knowledge of the ignorant. He assumes them both to
be recognized elements of comparison. The old proverb,
which makes our surnames "go by contraries," seems quite
as applicable to ourselves. Some of the bravest men who
have ever lived were afraid of ghosts. Hosts of those who
have built temples in all devotion, and covered their altars
with offerings, have been the most reckless and wicked in
violating the laws of the Deity to whose holy name they were
reared. When Lord Byron was at Missolonghi, lavishing
his fortune with prodigal enthusiasm, on the freedom and
redemption of Greece, he is said to have quarrelled almost
daily with the boatmen, about the coppers for their fares. I
am afraid that George Peabody would always go afoot, when
he could, rather than run the risk of being overcharged by a

JOHN McDONOOH. 203

cabman. But why should we look about for illustrations of
human inconsistency, when there is scarcely one of us who
has not had his own temper and toleration tried, by that
compound and marvel of all incompatibilities and contradic-
tions, a sincerely devout and as sincerely intolerant Christian ?
"We have no choice but to take men as they are, and recognize
the truth, that, although the nature of the stock may not be
altered by what we graft on it, it may still bring forth
precious fruit, according to the graft. A thoughtful writer
has well and wisely said, that "Religion does not alter
idiosyncrasy. When a fool becomes a Christian, he will be
a foolish Christian. A narrow-minded man will be a nar-
row-minded Christian, a stupid man a stupid Christian."
This observation is quite as just in regard to the operation
of other than religious influences and processes upon charac-
ter, and as, in the one case, we welcome the change which
is wrought by religion, notwithstanding it may have been
obstructed and is qualified by natural perversities, so must
we be content, in the others, to gather our figs and grapes,
although, by some mysterious working of nature, they have
come to us from among thorns and thistles.

A man's character, as a general rule, is apt to be much
more faithfully portrayed in the life which he leads, than in
the account which he gives of himself, with the best inten-
tions. The one is a photograph, the other is a portrait from
memory, by a partial hand. The one is the living and
instantaneous, and generally the natural expression of feel-
ing, principle and purpose. The other is, at best, a descrip-
tion and a recollection, if it be not, as is most likely, an
apology. It by no means follows that the story is true,

204 JOHN McDONOGH.

because there is an honest purpose to tell it truly. Self-
knowledge is as essential, in such case, as perfect candor,
and is, at least, as rare. We are quite as apt to apologize
to ourselves as to other people, for our shortcomings, and there
is no end to our readiness to accept our own explanations.
If there be anything in the past which we regret, or of which
we are ashamed, we try to persuade ourselves upon retro-
spection, that there was something in the circumstances or
our motives, which, if fully understood, would justify or at
least excuse it. If we put upon record anything in regard
to ourselves, for those who are to come after us, we naturally
state as facts, what we have satisfied ourselves must, or at
least ought to have been such; and the life, which repre-
sented us truly, as we lived it, is thus handed down in an
entirely new edition, " revised and corrected by the author."
These reflections, or something like them, are very necessary
to be made — indeed we can hardly help making them — when
we compare the actual, practical career of John McDonogh,
as men saw it and knew it, with the picture, taken pro-
fessedly from the inside, which he gives of himself in his last
will and in the instructions which he left to his executors.
He protests that he had " much, very much, to complain of
the world, rich as well as poor — " without pausing to reflect
how very much the world, as he dealt with it, had reason to
complain of him, and how entirely it was his own fault if
it misunderstood him. In his relation to his fellows there
was no trace of the loving kindness, which, he fancied, was
the inspiration of his life. It was nearly all the other way.
He had no friends ; he cherished no kindred ; he gave noth-
ing to the poor; he was grasping and exacting in all his

JOHN McDONOGH. 205

dealings, harsh and unmerciful to his debtors, even to the
widow and orphan — clamoring for his pound of flesh, no
matter how much of the heart's blood he brought away with
it. And yet, he protested afterwards, with all the earnest-
ness of absolute conviction, that during his whole life his
soul had "burned with an ardent desire to do good, much
good, great good " to his fellow-man, to the honor and glory
of his Lord and Master. He even apostrophised the victims,
whom he sought to drive to the wall, as " infatuated men ! "
because, instead of confessing judgment and allowing them-
selves to be sold out, in the interest of universal and post-
humous benevolence, they employed counsel to defend them,
and were sometimes able to persuade judges and juries that
their defenses were just. They ought to have seen, he says,
that he was suing them to gather moneys for them and their
children and not for himself, and that their attempt to thwart
him, and keep their own money, was but a painful illustra-
tion of "the frailty, the perversity and sinfulness of our
common nature." Consequently, when he had a verdict
against him and moved for a new trial, he describes that
very commonplace and frequent transaction as a righteous
struggle, on his part, against the "injustice and ingratitude"
of the defendants ; and he declares that he " swerved neither
to the right hand nor the left," but " persevered in an onward
course, determined, as the steward and servant of his Master,
to do them good, whether they would have it or whether they
would not have it." If the courts assisted them in not hav-
ing it, he cried out against the courts. " Of Judges and their
judgments," he exclaims, " I have also much, very much to
complain." He had, in fact, grown old in the world, like

206 JOHN McDONOGH.

Carlyle, without finding any one particular by good in it,
except his parents and himself.

Obviously there is a great deal to protest and rebel against
in all this — much that consideration for the dead does not
require us to accept. It is the language of an enthusiast,
proclaiming the holiness and the constancy of his own enthu-
siasm. It is the light of the present thrown back on the
darkness of the past. It is the natural endeavor of a man
who persuades himself that he is an apostle, to reconcile his
old and wicked works with his new and burning faith. The
history of mankind is full of such delusions and self-deception,
and the duty of respect is fulfilled by the world, when it
recognizes their sincerity. We are not bound, however, to
forget that self-delusion is delusion, because it may happen to
be honest and sincere. That McDonogh was thoroughly sin-
cere in the " reflections and opinions " which he directed to
be recorded and preserved by his executors, I think it impos-
sible to doubt. He believed in himself, and they were the
revelation of his creed. They bear, all over them, the stamp
of conviction, not only genuine but intense. I am not sure
that, at last, his intellect did not hover perilously near the
point at which men mistake their desires and convictions for
direct and divine inspiration. Though he did not illustrate
in his life — certainly not through the greater part of it — the
regenerating influences of the religion in which he was trained,
he obviously lived, within himself, in what he supposed to be
a religious atmosphere — more or less hazy, no doubt, and cer-
tainly unwholesome — and his modes of thinking and feeling
had that solemn cast which gives a sort of severe, religious
sanction, in some men's minds, to their own carnal resolves

JOHN McDONOGH. 207

and unregenerate will. There is a ring in his phraseology,
which shows that he was a frequent reader of the Old Testa-
ment, and that, like many men before and after him, he
conceived a certain force and perhaps sacredness to be given
to a statement, a doctrine or a proposition, not very forcible
or sacred in itself, by clothing it in the language of Scripture.
There is no reason to doubt that he was under much of the
same sort of influence, in that regard, which justified the
Puritans to themselves in exterminating Indians, under the
classification of " the heathen." His temperament was obvi-
ously melancholy, and his thoughts were bitter and gloomy.
The earth, altogether, was a dismal place to him, except
from the point of view of real estate, which he said that he
regarded as " the only thing in this world of ours, which
approaches anything like permanency." Altogether, with
his tendencies and peculiarities developed and exaggerated
by seclusion, fanaticism and morbid introspection, it is not
only not strange, but is in every way natural, that he should
have blended and confounded his desires and his delusions
with the realities of his life, and should have ended by
believing, with all the fierce intensity of a self-concentred
nature, that he had been engaged, from the beginning, in
laying the foundations of the mission, upon which he felt
himself, at the close, to have been sent.

It is enough for us to know and recognize that he did this
in good earnest and without doubting, and that, whether he
deceived himself or not, he was unconscious of meaning to
deceive any one else. He was not the first man whose faith
was better than his works. It may be, after all, that he was
right in his estimate of himself, and that his life was but

208 JOHN McDONOGH.

another of those mysteries of humanity, which are none the
less actual because they cannot be fathomed. But I have
felt, as I have said already, that I could not do justice to the
young people in whose presence I speak, and who will read
the life of their benefactor in that spirit of admiration which
is born of gratitude, without indicating in what it should be
a warning to them, and in what an example. I could not
hold up, as I do, to their imitation, the prudence, the intelli-
gence, the indomitable will, the industry and patient thrift
of John McDonogh — his manly independence, his self-reliance
and self-denial — without teaching them that these admirable
qualities have no necessary relation to the grim and ignoble
traits with which they were associated in his life and con-
duct. They must learn — and, under the excellent guidance
to which they fortunately are entrusted, they will not be
permitted to forget — that they were born to live in this
world, not merely to die out of it — and that their appointed
place is in the midst of their fellow-men, discharging man-
fully the duties, wrestling cheerfully with the responsibilities,
and exchanging kindly the charities, of life. Because the for-
tune which McDonogh was enabled to scatter from his death-
bed, had been gathered and kept together by all the devices of
money-getting and money-saving which commonly contract
the heart and debase the spirit, these children of the bounty
of his better days must not be deceived into believing that
the right way to the benevolence which crowned his life, lies
through the dark, repulsive paths by which he reached it.
Their homage to his memory will be none the less, from their
learning to distinguish between his virtues and his faults, and
taking to their bosoms the instructive lessons of both.

JOHN McDONOGH. 209

And now let us pass for a moment from the Founder to
his Foundation.

The old man sleeps in Greenmount, over the hills yonder,
and the flowers were reverently strewn upon his grave, yester-
day, by the young hands from which he asked and merited
that tribute. The marble pile round which they lie, scarce
faded yet, is what is called his monument, but his true monu-
ment is all about us here. Nor is it here only — it is wherever
the blessings of his bounty have been spread — wherever those
whom it has blessed are useful, happy, upright men. Already,
during the short period of the existence of this Institute, one
hundred and fifty educated youths, on whom, but for its aid,
the burden of poverty and ignorance would have rested with
all its paralysing weight, have gone forth into society, fitted
for its struggles and deserving its rewards. Into almost every
walk of useful and active life they have carried the manly
and substantial qualities of mind and character, which it has
been the special object and effort of this Institute to form and
foster. According to their ability and intelligence, they have
chosen or found their respective paths in life, and, whether
as successful candidates for university honors, or as workers
in the less ambitious ways of mechanical or industrial life,
it is pleasant and encouraging to know, that scarcely one of
them has proven unworthy of his trust and training. For
so happy and uncommon a result, the trustees of the Institute
are indebted, not only to the able, zealous and most efficient
superintendence which it has been their good fortune to secure
for their school, but to the wise regulations, which they have
themselves adopted, in regard to the admission of its pupils.
While respecting, as is their duty, the qualification of poverty
27

210 JOHN McDONOGH.

prescribed by the Founder, they have not chosen to regard
it as the only one. Compelled to select a few, from among
the many to whom indigence was a common recommendation,
they have carefully endeavored to choose those whose charac-
ter, capacity and associations were most likely to furnish a
good soil for the good seed. Any mistakes in their choice
they have not hesitated to correct, at once, by making the
unworthy or incapable give way to those who were capable
and worthy. In both appointments and removals, they have
been resolutely scrupulous to exclude personal considerations
of all sorts ; and it is as creditable to them, as it is to the
municipal corporation from which they derive their authority,
that political influences have not been permitted, for an instant,
to defile the current of the Founder's charity. Among the
competent and successful teachers who are now engaged in
the work of the Institute, there are already three of its own
graduates, and there is little room for doubt that, within a
reasonable period, the places which may become vacant in its
corps of tutors and professors, will be mainly filled from the
ranks of its own pupils.

This is not the place to discuss, with any fulness, the
scheme and methods of instruction which the trustees have
adopted. In all substantial particulars, and with no change,
except for the better, in details, they have strictly adhered
to the spirit of the Founder's instructions. They have not
been tempted by the natural and happily prevailing tendency
towards higher education, to forget that they are charged with
the duty of sending forth young men into the world, who
are to be fitted chiefly for its practical and material tasks
and duties. At the same time, they have repudiated the

JOHN McDONOGH. 211

old, narrow and fast-departing notion of purely practical
instruction, which so frequently resulted in little more than
formulating ignorance and subordinating the intellect to the
hands. A glance at the " Course of Instruction " which they
have prescribed, will sufficiently disclose with what care and
skill they have chosen the middle line — discarding a super-
ficial and barren inculcation of the simple rudiments and
laying, with reasonable thoroughness, the foundation of a
liberal, though practical, education. Mr. McDonogh him-
self, as might well be supposed, was not very broad or
enlightened in his views upon this subject. While, for
instance, he did not omit a brief direction that his bene-
ficiaries should be instructed in " the science generally of
agriculture," he was far more particular in describing, because
he better understood, what he meant by "the art of hus-
bandry or farming ; " and if the time of the pupils of the
Institute were to be literally dedicated, in the detail which
he prescribed, to " plowing, hoeing, harrowing, spading, mow-
ing, reaping, gathering, housing, thrashing, sowing, planting,
gardening, carting and waggoning, making of all agricultural
instruments, rearing and attending to animals, rearing and
attending to the silk worm and the mulberry tree, etc., etc.,
etc., etc., at the same time that they are progressing in their
education," it is not difficult to characterize or measure the
"education," in which they would be likely to "progress."
Between the outdoor work, which was thus in his mind, and
the large devotion of their indoor hours, which he so strenu-
ously inculcated, to " instruction in divine psalmody or sacred
music," their four allotted years of preparation, it is safe to
say, would have gone by, without their being particularly

212 JOHN McDONOGH.

fitted for any other occupation than that of excellent farm
laborers on week days, and perhaps of indifferent choristers
on Sundays. From these details, which would have nar-
rowed the sphere and belittled the results of the Founder's
benevolence, and would have disappointed, beyond measure,
his hopes and calculations, it was the duty of the trustees to
rise to a higher conception of his wishes. It became them to
read the charter of his bounty in the light of the great pur-
pose which he proclaimed — that of rescuing destitute youth
from ignorance and idleness, and "bringing them up in
knowledge and virtue, to industry and labor." To this
consummation it was their duty to subordinate all lesser
considerations and details, and it is a source of no ordinary
gratification, to all who are familiar with their progress,
that they have discharged that duty with such persistent
intelligence and firmness.

Nor have the trustees of the institution been less successful
in their management and application of its material resources.
John McDonogh was very far less rich than he supposed.
Indeed there is no stronger evidence of the dominion of his
dreams over him, than the future which he anticipated from
the institutions for which he provided, and the dimensions to
which he fancied that their resources would expand. The
pupils of this single institution, he supposed, would number
from one to two thousand, from the first, and he thought
that with ordinary care, they would be at least ten thousand,
in time. The city of Baltimore was not alone in his con-
templation. He persuaded himself that his charity would
reach not only to the chief maritime cities of the Union —
" which are too generally hot-beds of vice," as he added in

JOHN McDONOGH. 213

parenthesis — but to the other large cities of the different
States, and even to the towns and villages of Maryland.
Archdeacon Paley is reported to have assigned, as a reason
for not allowing his wife and daughters to contract shop-
debts, that " ready money is a marvellous restraint upon the
imagination " — yet here was a man, whose whole life had been
dedicated to ready money, and whose imagination, neverthe-
less, in that very regard, was as boundless as romance. It is
true that his estate had to pass — as the large estates of child-
less men are apt to pass, in this country — through the dread
ordeal of protracted and enormous litigation. The courts
and juries, of which he had so bad an opinion in his lifetime,
had their chance at his goods and chattels, lands and tene-
ments, after he was gone. The lawyers too, of whom I regret
to say that he did not think much more highly than of the
tribunals, had their opportunities of posthumous revenge and
reprisal. In one way or another, the lamb passed through
many thickets and left much of its fleece upon the brambles
by the wayside. The valuation also which McDonogh had
set upon many of his investments turned out to be fanciful
and often absurd. He had put faith as well as money in
swamp lands, where the money, at least, went down, like
Ravenswood, among the quicksands. And then the war
came, and after the war came reconstruction, as, after death,
the judgment. It is no wonder therefore that the dreams
and hopes of the enthusiast, which were spread wide enough
to cover the nation, should have been folded, like the tent of
the magician, until their " stuff " and substance could be held
almost in a single hand. And yet, though comparatively
small, the resources of this Institute, I am happy to say, are

214 JOHN McDONOGH.

actually large. Through faithful and judicious management,
its interest-bearing capital, to-day, is over seven hundred
thousand dollars. The whole value of the trust estate, at a
fair and moderate estimate, is at least nine hundred thousand.
Out of the revenue of the trust, without borrowing money
or trenching upon capital, and with that admirable sense of
appropriateness which is the essence of good taste, the trustees
have erected the stately and commodious edifice in which we
hold this first commencement. The school which began, in
1873, with but twenty-one pupils, has now fifty — all that it
can hold. The contemplated addition to the building will
enable it soon to receive three times that number. For the
vacancies which will exist upon the graduation of the present
class, there are more than seventy applicants. Numbers of
persons whose means enable them to furnish the best educa-
tion to their children, are applying for their admission as
paid pupils. Except as a means of increasing the charities
of the institution, it is hardly possible for such applications
to be favored, but they testify, with obvious sincerity, to
the excellence of its teaching and its high standard of dis-
cipline and morals.

Such is the condition of the Institute. Without debt and
freed from litigation — without a single obligation, beyond
those of charity and duty — it stands erect, for the first time,
under its own roof-tree, with a noble future flashing in its
face. May it continue as heretofore, to be worthy of its
destiny, under the smiles of Him who has made of charity
a benediction ! Its Founder was sanguine enough to express
the conviction that it would not long remain the only one of
its kind, in the vicinity of that "noble, philanthropic and

JOHN McDONOOH. 215

high-minded city, Baltimore." Let us persuade ourselves
that this expression was not rash. Let us believe that there
are hearts, in the city of the old man's love, from which this
conviction will be echoed yet. Let us hope that there are
men among us, to whom the possession of great wealth may
yet suggest the association of their names and bounty, with
those of McDonogh and Peabody, Hopkins and Pratt.

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY IN ITS
RELATIONS TO BALTIMORE.

AN ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT THE

SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY,

FEBRUARY 22, 1883.

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

ME. PRESIDENT;

GENTLEMEN OF THE BOARD AND OF THE FACULTY:

I AM very sensible of the honor which has been done me
by the invitation to take part in your proceedings
to-day, and yet I have accepted it with considerable hesita-
tion. The topics which are most appropriate to the occasion
will not bear superficial treatment in such a presence, and it
is not easy for a man of my intellectual habits and restricted
pursuits to give them any other. The problems of educa-
tion, and particularly of the higher education, are occupying,
at this moment, not only the best, but the best-trained minds
of the world ; and their study and solution have become a
noble specialty, into which the best intentions will not justify
rash intrusion. One may be permitted to say that what are
irreverently called " crotchets " are not altogether absent from
even the higher educational atmosphere, and there is, there-
fore, the greater reason for dispensing with the crude specula-
tions of desultory thinkers.

I am not sure that it is not one of the most natural results
of the system which this university represents and embodies,

219

220 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

to force upon men who were educated in our American col-
leges of half a century ago, a strong and perhaps not very
agreeable sense of the comparative shortcomings of their own
early intellectual training. I refer, especially, of course, to
those who passed — at once and young, as was the custom then
even more than now — there being opportunity for little else —
from undergraduate life into professional or other special and
absorbing avocations. To the most of these I am persuaded
that their collegiate course was chiefly valuable, as a memory,
a discipline, and an influence ; and that, apart from these, it
contributed comparatively little to the permanent material
out of which their intellectual life was constructed. Of my
own profession, I think I can safely say, that by far the
most of them were well content, if they could keep alive the
scholarly and classic tastes, which — whether the scholarship
was much or little according to later tests- — were bred and
nurtured in their college days, and of which no one knows
the solace and enjoyment half so well as they whose minds
run in one life-long, narrow groove, yearning and longing,
it may be, all the while, for something broader and better.
Face to face with the precise and accurate teaching and
knowledge of to-day, the systematized and ceaseless investi-
gation, the critical ordeals, the perpetual search after truth
and its fearless recognition when tested and established, the
exact and scientific methods, the definite results, the scorn of
routine and the rude questioning of tradition, which charac-
terize the modern education — face to face, I say, with these,
we remember our curricula and college examinations of the
days gone by with feelings more or less grave, according to
each man's sense of humor. It is not altogether human, of

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 221

course, for the undergraduate of those times to forget, or even
cease to love, the shade where he sported with his own aca-
demic Amaryllis — old though she be and faded now — but,
clearly, to the dullest perception, a new order of things has
arisen, and a better. Whether it be a development, or a new
species, I remember nothing of my college learning which
would enable me to determine.

There is one thing, however, which reconciles a man of the
old dispensation to the risk of going beyond his depth on
one of these occasions, and that is their total freedom from
pretension. I have always greatly admired the quiet and
unostentatious way in which the anniversaries of this univer-
sity have been kept — instead of being what is commonly
called "celebrated" — the notable contrast between the sim-
plicity of the announcements and the large and progressive
results which are announced. This seems to me not only
the natural result of the plan and working of the university,
and for that reason of great importance and significance, but
very admirable in itself and as an example. Small things
are so habitually called by large names among our people,
and our little fishes — to use Goldsmith's criticism of John-
son— are so apt to speak like great whales, that the spectacle
of an institution like this, discarding superlatives altogether,
and telling its yearly story in a quiet way, without other
emphasis than that inherent in the story told, is, to say the
least of it, very edifying. One is almost able to flatter him-
self, sometimes, that the general tendency to public speaking,
in this country, is something less than it once was, and that
active elocution is not now quite so commonly regarded as the
natural state of man. But, be this as it may, the "tuba,

222 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

mirum spargens sonum" is beginning to go out of fashion
as an accompaniment to what is worth telling, and we can-
not but welcome, as a public service in that direction, every
conspicuous demonstration that the soberer style is all-sufficient
for the largest purposes of communication with the people.

I alluded, just now, to my own profession — that of the
law — and I hope that I am not disloyal to it in expressing
my gratification that the group with which it is generally
associated, under the style of "the learned professions," has
ceased, except in common and traditionary parlance, to mon-
opolize that title. Of course, I should be very far from feel-
ing gratification at their being less learned than heretofore — if
such were the case. What I mean to speak of, as a ground
for universal congratulation, is the fact that modern education
has developed many other professions — all quite as worthy,
to say the least, of being called " learned/' and some of them
involving the largest amplitude and variety of learning which
the intellect can grasp. In speaking of these new professions,
I deal with them, not merely as groups of students, devoted
to research and discovery, and " hiving thought " — which is
by far too much the common notion of them — but as bodies
of eminently practical men, whose whole objects and methods
are practical, in the truest meaning of the word, and whose
business and purpose it is, not merely to find the ore of
science, but to dig it, and bring it to the light, and make its
products malleable, and adaptable to all the manifold uses of
society. No one has illustrated in briefer phrase than Mr.
Huxley the action and reaction of the practical and theoreti-
cal upon each other in science. I refer to his observation,
that while "all true science begins with empiricism," it is

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 223

true science, " exactly in so far as it strives to pass out of the
empirical stage into the deduction of empirical from more
general truths." With the spread and progress of these new
professions, the old idea of the " practical man/7 the simple
empiric — uneducated for the most part, except in so far as
the manufacturer of pin's heads may be said to have a pin's
head education — will pass into limbo. New avenues will be
opened into the fields of industrial labor and production, and
it goes without saying that the soil will respond to the tillage
in which the head is guide of the hand. Doubtless the prac-
tical man will not yield without a struggle. When Sir Robert
Peel proposed to establish the system of penny postage, a depu-
tation of paper manufacturers waited upon him with a serious
remonstrance, in which they urged that they would suffer
incalculable loss, inasmuch as everybody would write upon
note-paper instead of letter-sheets. But, precisely as the
paper manufacturer has found that the increase of corre-
spondence from cheap postage has developed tenfold his
former trade, so the merely practical man will discover
that the new education, which removes him from the place
where he is dangerous or helpless except in his rut, will find
him other occupations in which he can thrive, and will teach
his children to tread the path, with knowledge, along which
he groped in blind routine. It is most desirable, indeed, to
have it understood that a multitude of new and truly practi-
cal avocations is the natural outcome of the new system and
methods of scientific education. As I intimated just now,
the average citizen has not altogether overcome the notion
that a body of learned men, engaged in daily and laborious
scientific research, is a sort of close corporation — very wise,

224 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

very able, very eminent, no doubt, but set apart, by its
nature and occupations, from the common uses and purposes
of every-day life, and leaving its principal traces in the
reports of " philosophical transactions." It is hard to make
the ordinary thinker realize that the electric flame, which
lights the whole coast-line of a continent with the radiance
of a new sun, fresh taught to walk the night, was first kindled
in a laboratory such as lies but a few paces from where you
sit. You could ill persuade him to what an extent the biol-
ogist has unravelled the substantial problems of life in all
nature, and has already instructed the physician to answer,
through their solution, the hourly domestic questioning of
disease and remedy. He would be astounded to know how
physics and chemistry walk unseen and close by his side,
lending him their help at every step of his existence, and
at every stage and variety of the labor which supports and
the civilization which protects him. He could not easily
comprehend that the abstruse mathematics, whose written
language may be to him an unknown tongue, is the great
vehicle of scientific expression and fact from worlds-end to
world's-end, almost bearing, Atlas-like, the globe of science on
its shoulders. He little imagines that the philologist whom he
supposes to be engaged in word-fancying and word-spelling —
a process for which he has, himself, supreme contempt — is
shedding by his labors a new and certain light upon the his-
tory of mankind, is tracing the descent and relation of races
and people, is separating fable from truth, is putting tradition
and story under cross-examination upon the witness-stand,
and fixing, even for religious inquiry and Biblical criticism,
the certain and firm foundations of faith and dissent.

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 225

I repeat that these things, and others like them, are only
half realized as living and practical truths by the average
citizen who has work to do and children to educate ; and that
the new walks of applied science, to which the teachings of
this university open the way, are not yet known and recog-
nized as they should, and as I am sure they will be among
us, when men are considering the future of those whom they
love best and wish to serve best. I should therefore feel, as
an humble member of this community, that I had done as
good a day's work for it as a man could well do for a com-
munity to which he owes much, if I could help to diffuse
among its people a thorough comprehension of what this noble
endowment holds out to them with full hands.

As in most American communities, it is our habit to edu-
cate too little. Naturally, I do not refer to those of our
people to whom necessity leaves no choice or discretion, but
to those who are able, and according to their lights are
willing, to educate their children. Their error lies in their
false or imperfect notion of what an education really means.
Instead of realizing that a young man is most likely to fall
into the vocation which suits him best, and to make the most
of himself in it — after he has been taught enough to enable
him to measure his own gifts, and has had sufficient scope
of instruction to fit him for any one of various occupations,
according to his tastes and opportunities — they choose or per-
mit him to choose his calling beforehand, and endeavor to
shape and mould what he learns to that and that only.
Instead of his life-pursuit springing healthily and spontane-
ously like an indigenous plant, from those elements of a
thoroughly cultivated mental soil which feed it best, his
29

226 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

education is made a sort of hot-bed, to force the plant —
perhaps against nature — in advance of its season, into the
market. For the most part, if a professional career is to be
adopted, they select the law or medicine. If warned, as they
well may be, by the largely overcrowded ranks of both, they
distrust the future of the young man in either, his course is
shaped, in the main, for some mercantile pursuit, or for one
of the many other occupations which are classed under the
comprehensive head of " business." For these it is not sup-
posed that any peculiar or protracted preparation is essential,
the chief requisite being that the victim shall get through
early and " go ahead." The idea that he will be the better
fitted for every and any calling, and especially for moving
from the rear to the front — from the ranks to command —
according to the development of his faculties, the training and
discipline of his mind, his knowledge of things knowable and
his capacity to apply things applicable — does not seem to occur
to the great mass of those to whom the destinies of young
men are entrusted. Least of all, does it seem to enter their
minds that there is a score of occupations, professional in the
fullest and practical in the most literal sense, outside of those
called " learned," in which a careful scientific education opens
the door to the highest usefulness and success. I say noth-
ing of the value of knowledge in itself and apart from the
returns it brings. I speak here only of its value in use,
of the resources and capital which it furnishes, and which
neither the accidents of trade nor the vicissitudes of fortune
can impair — much less destroy.

What has been said has been mainly in the interest of the
student ; but it is impossible to separate his interest, in these

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 227

regards, from that of the community, or to overestimate the
merely economical gain, to the whole country, of an infusion
of scientific and educated labor and direction into all its indus-
tries and enterprise. It is painful to the last degree, in sea-
sons of commercial disaster or depression, to see how absolutely
without resource so large a number of our young men are,
finding themselves deprived of their ordinary occupation,
without knowledge enough of anything outside to enable
them to turn in other directions for bread. They have
pursuits, but really no calling. Nor is this true only of
those who depend upon the vicissitudes of trade or specula-
tion; for nothing is more certain in every industrial crisis
than that the uneducated workman is the first to feel the
loss of place or the pressure of reduced compensation. To
those who may desire to make politics their profession — and
even to the much larger number who merely seek political
preferment — it is impossible to overestimate the value of those
attainments, which enable a man to deal, in a capable and
educated way, with the multifarious and complicated ques-
tions of scientific theory and fact, that spring up at every
instant in the government of a mighty people like ours.
Politics themselves are, of course, a science, and in the true
sense one of the noblest of sciences. Practically, however,
among us, they are rather what is called, in our old-fashioned
law-English, an " art or mystery ; " and they are learned and
practiced, as such, though not publicly taught, that I am
aware. The Marquis de Costa Beauregard, writing to Joseph
de Maistre in 1789, CL propos of the impending revolution in
France, made an observation which has always struck me as
very clever, in the best style of French cleverness. " Dog-

228 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

matic opinion," he said, " should not touch on politics, for
on that head there is no revelation." I am afraid, from some
personal experience, that the absence of revelation has not
always prevented people from dogmatizing, somewhat actively,
upon some political questions in this country ; but I still am
Utopian enough to believe that the time is not far off, when
a chair of political science will be filled in every university,
and men will be taught, in good faith, at all events, the radi-
cal distinction between politics and party, and between party
and plunder. I am not very sanguine, however, I confess,
as to the controlling effect of what men study at the univer-
sity, in matters of government, upon their practical political
courses ; and I remember that I could not avoid some mental
questionings upon that point, when listening with great inter-
est, a few years ago, to a very able discourse, in which it was
discussed, on one of the anniversaries of this university, by
a distinguished gentleman of great authority, who is present
here to-day. [President White, of Cornell University.]
When entirely convinced, upon satisfactory and indifferent
evidence, that a single representative in Congress, from a
district which favors protection, has voted openly against a
protective tariff, because he was taught free trade at college,
I shall be willing to qualify my modest scepticism. Mean-
time, let us believe, at all events, with the great English
teacher whom I have quoted above, that the time will come,
" when there shall be no member of the legislature, who will
not know as much of science as an elementary school boy."

These suggestions are presented in a loose and informal
manner, for they belong too much to the commonplaces of
the occasion to be offered in a more ambitious way. Indeed,

TEE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 229

it is because they are commonplaces, and yet are not under-
stood and appreciated as they should be, that I have made
them, from choice, the burden of what I have to say. If I
could reach the ear of every man in this community, who has
children whom he can afford to educate, I could not befriend
him more, than by impressing him with a sense of the waste
and folly of seeking for them, elsewhere, the instruction which
is so prodigally at their service here. It is true that this is a
university, and that it stands already, through its work and
workers, in the front rank of universities. It is true that its
great destiny, in the world of knowledge, is to be wrought
out in its character of university. But it is a college as well.
Its collegiate department is ample, its instruction thorough,
its methods of the best. The teacher, instead of being,
merely, as is so often the case — and as in the olden days he
almost invariably was — a sort of circulating medium between
the text-book and the undergraduate comprehension — is the
companion and co-worker of his pupils. Surrounded in the
study and the class-room, the laboratory and the lecture-room,
with all the books and appliances which belong to the par-
ticular department; segregated, for the time, from all but
the particular work and his companions in it; stimulated
by competition, co-operation and encouragement ; kept up to
the mark by rigid, and yet wise and fair examinations ; with
nothing lacking to his development that educational science
can supply, through the liberal application of a large and
beneficent endowment — if the undergraduate student of this
university cannot make a man of himself here, it will be in
vain for him to go elsewhere for his making. It is easy, and
often useful, to criticise the distribution of studies in every

230 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

institution ; and I believe there is no institution in which it
is not habitually done, fairly or unfairly, as the case may be.
But "dogmatic opinion" is as much out of place in such
matters as in politics. It would be strange, indeed, if a new
institution like this — scarce seven years old — were already so
perfect in its entire organization as to be beyond criticism or
improvement. It invites fair criticism — it hesitates at no
change which brings improvement. For my own part, I
cannot too heartily applaud the skill with which its under-
graduate courses are distributed and the theory of their dis-
tribution— recognizing the eclectic principle, upon the one
hand, by conceding the choice of studies, and yet preventing
its abuse, by grouping the studies for selection. And then,
above all, stands the university itself, beckoning the under-
graduate on to its opportunities, advantages and honors.
There he sees about him men of culture and enthusiasm,
the graduates of other institutions, who have come to drink
at the fountains which will flow for him also. All around
him is labor, opportunity, life, progress and achievement.
There is no such thing as standing still. The year-books
of scientific research and discovery are filled with the results
of what is going on around him. The men who lead and
direct it, and they who come from a distance to help it on,
are, many of them, world-famous — most of them becoming
and worthy to become so. It seems to me that in all this
there is everything to kindle the ambition and pride of the
student, awaken his enthusiasm, and develop his powers. I
can well understand that young gentlemen may sometimes
prefer to have their powers develop, in their own way, at a
distance from home and its restraints ; and that what is called

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 231

" college life " has attractions for some, which may outshine
the allurements and opportunities of scholarship. But I can-
not understand how it is that parents can take that view of
the subject, or can believe that the shelter of the parental
roof and the present watchfulness of parental solicitude and
affection can diminish the value of the education which comes
to their doors. Indeed, in the very many cases in which the
question of education is, more or less, a question of cost to
the parent, and he is forced or chooses to deal with it upon
" commercial principles,'7 it seems to me that he overlooks
the first rule of " business," when he sends abroad for what
he can procure, at least as good, on better terms, at home.

But, quite apart from these considerations, and worthy to
be taken into account with the best of them, are the relation
which this university bears, and is destined to bear, to our
city and the State of Maryland, and the obligations which are
incident to that relation. A man of large fortune, under the
impulse of large and benevolent ideas, thought proper, at his
death, to dedicate an ample portion of that fortune to the
endowment of a great university among us bearing his name.
It was the deliberate purpose of his life, and he selected, with
deliberation and wise foresight, the agents and agencies for
its consummation. To the best of their ability these trusted
agents have done the work assigned to them, and no differ-
ences of opinion, upon other questions, can justify a doubt
that they have done it, thus far, well. That this university,
in its infancy, is already a noble monument to its Founder
is, I repeat, a fact indisputable to all who are even super-
ficially familiar with the records of scientific and educational
opinion, at home and abroad. What it is, in itself and as a

232 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

monument, it is to us and ours as it is to him. It should be
our pride, as it is his glory. Day by day it is growing in
every element of usefulness, and in every force that can work
for good. All the seeds of development are germinating and
quick within it. It is not here for to-day or to-morrow, for
this year or the next, but for all time — a possession forever,
so far as human things may be. Its Founder has done his
part. His trusted agents have done theirs. It is for the
people at whose feet the offering is laid to do their part like-
wise. Theirs must be a living and active part, too, or it will
be vain and fruitless. Neither sympathy, nor sentiment, nor
admiration, nor praise, will suffice. You had as well think
of speeding a ship upon her voyage by wishing that the winds
may blow — after the manner of the third ode of Horace.
What the university needs, to make the most of itself— what
the community needs, to make to itself anything of the uni-
versity— is downright, actual, daily co-operation on the part
of our people. They must realize to themselves what such an
institution is worth, and can be made worth, to them and
their posterity. They must think of it growing with their
growth, exploring and developing their physical resources,
enlarging their minds, expanding and refining their culture
and their tastes, bringing home to them and naturalizing every
new discovery and application of science elsewhere, and, domi-
ciliating, as it were, among them, every fresh discovery and
application of its own. They must appreciate its value, intel-
lectually and socially, as a centre of thought — the resort of
students and men of learning from a distance — all seeking its
advantages and all bringing something in exchange for what
they seek. Even to-day, there is hardly a field of current

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 233

thought into which it has not already invited us to enter,
under the guidance of men who are, themselves, among the
leaders of thought in the world. And what are we to do
with all this benefaction ? Are we to stand and look at the
university, afar off and far below, as men stand in a valley
or a gorge and gaze at a castle on a hill ? You will remem-
ber a score of Dora's pictures, which will tell you what I
mean — the vivid light, above, on tower and keep, the dark-
ness tangible beneath. Not so, I trust. I can imagine the
stir, some morning, if the rumor were to run and to be true,
that some galleon of the olden times — such as the English
buccaneers (known historically, by the by, as the "great
navigators") were in the habit of plundering on their way
from Mexico to Spain — were anchored in our harbor, with
her cargo of ingots of silver generously placed at the service
of our citizens. I think one might venture to say that the
significance of such a phenomenon would be promptly and
generally comprehended in all its practical aspects — that the
officers and even the crew of that welcome vessel would be
borne in triumph to Druid Hill Park and Bayview, and all
places of municipal attraction and delight, upon the footing
of the most favored visitors, in the most gorgeous convey-
ances which could be provided by a liberal committee of our
hospitable City Council. In regard to taking advantage of
the godsend, I think probably the only question would be
as to who should get the most of it. The cases of indiffer-
ence or self-denial would hardly be numerous enough to be
embarrassing. Yet many a galleon went to* sea, in those old
days, with less of actual counted treasure in her hold, than
here, in money value, we have taken under the endowment
30

234 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

of Johns Hopkins. Instead of tossing it into the air, in the
shape of riches which make themselves wings and fly, he has
planted it deep in our soil, so that it shall take root and grow.
And can any one venture to compare the worth of his bene-
faction, if he had scattered it in present, actual largess to
our people — so that some of it should go into every man's
purse — with its value, as he chose to make it, to us and our
posterity ? Think of the actual, material money value — the
material, tangible, yearly product — to a community, of suc-
cessive and growing generations of educated men, carrying
with them into every profession and every department of
busy and social life, the knowledge which fertilizes every
field, and fructifies every industry, and makes right hands
of all the hands of enterprise. Counted by dollars and
cents — tested by no book but the ledger — the actual wealth
exceeds, a thousand-fold, to say the least of it, what would
have come to us, if the money had been piled in one of our
squares and been distributed to all comers, per capita, by the
police. I put it in this purely economical and homely way,
not to belittle the subject, nor by way of insinuating that
our people are incapable of comprehending it in its proper
statement and its loftier and nobler aspects. I only desire
to illustrate what I mean, by showing, that if they were
thoroughly and fully to realize the value of this foundation
in all points of view, as they do realize, at sight, the value of
present gold, or of the venture or the speculation to which
they see, or think they see, a golden lining, there would be
no need of urging their co-operation to knit this university
with their proudest hopes and most active struggles for the
prosperous future of their city and their State.

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 235

A candid man must recognize, of course, that such co-opera-
tion, in a full and deep sense of its necessity and of the good
that must come from it, cannot spring up, all at once, in a
community whose citizens, for generations, have been accus-
tomed to dispense too much with higher education and to
look for what they have had of it to institutions at a
distance. Habit and fashion are powerful and slow to
change, in this as in things of lesser moment. A commer-
cial city, which has been built up entirely by trade and its
enterprises, cannot take in, upon short notice, all that is
meant by its becoming, for the future, a university town,
as well. As the feudal town grew up around the castle
that protected it, and the university town of old around its
university, so the town of commerce has its own special
centres, and with difficulty shapes itself around any others.
I know that I am treading, with unaccustomed feet, a path
which is especially familiar to the students of institutional his-
tory around me ; and, having been misled, in early life — by
what I took to be the high historical authority of Diedrich
Knickerbocker — into the faith (pace Dr. Adams and Dr.
Freeman) that an American town, in its origin, is "the
accidental assemblage of a church, a tavern and a black-
smith's shop/7 it is possible that I may carry my idea of
the original nucleus and its influence perhaps too far. But
Baltimore, I am persuaded, as a matter of fact, has grown,
rather than been added to or altered; and, in the main, is
the same Baltimore as always, only richer, stronger, older,
more mature. Its social traits and habits, the tone and
temper, the manners and manhood of its people are, for
the most part and happily, but little changed. It has the

236 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

right to be proud of them, and, speaking for myself as for
the rest, I confess that it is quite as proud of them as it
has the right to be. It is full of enterprise, in its way,
and yet it clings, with unaltered devotion, to many of the
traditional clogs to enterprise. It is fond of being what is
called " conservative " — often forgetting Carlyle's maxim that
the value of conservatism depends upon the value of the
things conserved. It aspires to be a metropolis, and it ought
to be and will be, though it is not yet ; but it will become,
rather than make itself such. Thus far, it has not entirely
outgrown the retail idea, that the judicious advertising of a
thing, as a fact, will save the necessity of its being or becom-
ing one. Can I say anything stronger as to our neglect of
home opportunities, than that we have been practising vivi-
section upon the oyster, for an hundred and fifty years,
without knowing, until told by Dr. Brooks, of the domestic
affections of that cherished mollusk, or the conditions upon
which alone its days may be long in the water. We may
look at any time, I fear, for some equally humiliating dis-
closure of our want of physiological acquaintance with the
diamond-back terrapin ; although a mummy of that sacred
reptile will be found, I am sure, in the sarcophagus of the
prehistoric Marylander, should such ever be discovered.

But pardon this trifling, for one must not dwell too seri-
ously upon the shortcomings of a community which he
cherishes and whose faults he shares, although he cannot,
as a man, be silent, in regard to them, when it is proper he
should speak. Nor is it a safe thing always to be too plain-
spoken on such matters. Of this, a conspicuous proof recurs
to my memory. The late Mr. John P. Kennedy, well known

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 237

in the literature of American fiction, and one of the most grace-
ful and accomplished writers and gentlemen of his day, was
rash enough to say, upon some public occasion, in his early
manhood, that this community of ours was " not a reading
community." Unhappily, at that time, what he said was
true, which was so much the worse for it and for him. It
so happened, in the course of things, that he afterwards
aspired to public life, for which his talents and acquire-
ments eminently fitted him. He was successful, more than
once, in his ambition, but always under difficulties; and I
do not remember a single canvass in which his name was
presented, where that unhappy speech of his did not cling
to him like the albatross to the Ancient Mariner. More
than once I have myself heard it called up in judgment
against him on the hustings ; and I can testify to the lively
indignation with which it was received, especially by that por-
tion of the lieges who might most readily have been excused
from reading, for the reason that they did not know how.

But — badinage aside — this community has reached a stage
of its progress, when it could no longer have any excuse, if
it sought one, for being narrow-minded or provincial, or
reckless of its opportunities. If it has not yet fully availed
itself of these, so far as concerns the university, it is because
they have not been long enough afforded to be familiar or
thoroughly comprehended; because the old paths have not
been long enough opened and extended in the direction of
the new ways. But the future relations of the State and the
university are covered by a simple and single statement. The
university is here, and here it will remain. If the people
whose homes are around it should not appreciate or covet

238 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

the gifts which it offers them, the people who do appreciate
and do covet them will still come from other homes and
seek them. There is no fear that the numbers of these will
decrease, or that a noble foundation like this will cry aloud
in the wilderness and no man hearken to it. For the mere
diffusion of knowledge among mankind — if that were all — it
will matter little from what distance or from what quarter
of the world the lamps are brought here to be filled and
lighted. But, to us, it matters much whether or not we
shall play the part of the foolish virgins. It was not merely
for the general diffusion of knowledge that the university was
endowed. Next the heart of its Founder was the prime and
cherished desire, that the people among whom his wealth had
been gathered, his friendships formed and the best years of
his life usefully spent, should drink, first and chiefly, of the
cup which he filled for posterity. It was not in his mind
that they would turn from it or dash it from their lips.
Nor, in what I have taken occasion here to say, nor from
the earnestness with which it has been said, am I to be
understood as anticipating or deeming it necessary to depre-
cate so pessimistic a result. Slowly, but with regular and
certain progress, the interest of our people in this institution
has been developing itself year after year. The increasing
list of its undergraduate students discloses the significant and
hopeful fact, that they are the sons of parents in all callings
and all classes of life, and, in a large degree, of those who are
most capable of passing an intelligent and, indeed, authorita-
tive judgment upon the merit of educational systems and
methods. That the influence of such approval and sympa-
thy will diffuse itself, widely and certainly, in the course

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 239

of time, it would be unreasonable to doubt. What I would
impress upon our citizens — if my voice were worthy to be
heard — is their waste of present time and opportunity in
waiting; the loss, to the institution itself, of that imme-
diate and happy impulse which would quicken it, if its
halls were thronged with the ambitious youth and promise
of Maryland, and the sympathy of her people were concen-
trated there, upon the labors and struggles and aspirations
of their children. This is what I mean by the sympathy
which I would venture to bespeak — the only sympathy which
is practical and worth having. The longer it is delayed, the
longer the usefulness of the institution will lack development
for local good — the longer, of course, the postponement of
that good, for those who will sit upon the banks and see
the stream go by.

In what has been said it has, of course, been understood
that I have spoken as a citizen only, and in the interest of
the community to which I belong. For the university,
except in so far as it and the community are one in interest
and in respect and duty to the Founder, I have no claim and
could not presume to speak. But, having always taken the
deepest interest in questions of public education, and having
keenly felt, as well as constantly observed, in a long profes-
sional life, the need of more precise and accurate and full
instruction, and especially scientific instruction, even among
those whose educational opportunities have been best, I con-
fess to a more than common solicitude for the speedy identi-
fication of this university with the intellectual development
and progress of our people. Without undervaluing, for
example, the facility with which an alert and well-trained

240 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

intellect, in my profession, may for the moment appropriate
to itself enough of special scientific knowledge for the occa-
sional needs of the trial-table and the examination of experts,
and may use that knowledge with efficiency and force, I can-
not but recognize it as akin to the painful cramming by which
young gentlemen sometimes substitute their memory for their
intelligence, when examinations are hovering in the air. And
it is a dreary thing, at the best, for a man to be prosecuting
scientific inquiry in public, under the primary and difficult
condition of not going beyond his own depth. I fancy that
the embarrassment must be equally serious to the medical
man and the Biblical student and teacher, when, to use a
railway phrase, they are compelled to take in scientific fuel
at all the way-stations. Perhaps, though I hardly venture
to suggest it, they may share a certain relief, in the presence
of their patients and hearers, which we have, in our way, at
the bar. I mean the confidence that if counsel happen to
know little of science, the jury probably know less. And
here it is worth while to say — what I know to be true, from
considerable opportunity of knowing — that the public would
be startled, if they could realize the extent and depth of the
ignorance of ordinary rudimental scientific principle and fact,
upon the part of the great mass of those who are entrusted
with the daily practical application of the mightiest and most
dangerous mechanical forces. I remember well the testimony
of an engineman, who was produced as an expert in a case
arising out of a disastrous boiler explosion, and who affirmed
his superior right to testify, by deposing, with some defiance,
that he did not think any one knew anything about such
matters, " except a man who had been brought up in a boiler-

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 241

room." He ascribed the particular explosion to "the gases
in the boiler," and when asked what gases he meant, he
replied, with an air of triumph, " How can I tell ? I was
not inside the boiler." From that day's experience to the
present, I have never ceased to regard, as one of the greatest
needs of our State and city and one of the richest boons that
could be vouchsafed to them, the establishment of technical
schools, with all the shops, appliances and apparatus for
thorough, scientific, mechanical instruction. Nor will I
abandon the hope that some man or men, of large wealth
and largeness of view, like Stevens of Hoboken, will before
long earn the lasting gratitude of this community, and, espe-
cially, of its men of toil, by affiliating some such institution
with the Hopkins foundation.

And this leads me to one other cognate topic, which I
should not impose upon your patience, but for its important
bearing upon some of the considerations which have already
been presented. All that is in it is obvious enough, to any
one who reflects ; and it is worth touching, only because the
most intelligent people, when otherwise preoccupied, do not
always stop for reflection. I refer to the truth — so per-
petually illustrated by experience — that to the attainment
of knowledge, and especially of scientific knowledge, it is
almost as essential that it should be pursued under proper
guidance as that it should be pursued at all. To the gener-
ality of this observation there are, of course, exceptions, and
none so conspicuous as the few in which real genius is its own
inspiration. But the self-made man, for the most part, is a
very imperfect manufacture, and his leading characteristic is
apt to be — as was cruelly but most cleverly said of the late
31

242 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

Mr. Horace Greeley, when he boasted of his self-making —
that " he worships his creator." Of course, if he has merit
and has had no choice but to make himself, it is impossible
not to commend his efforts; and it is but just to make allow-
ances for his mistakes, while we regret the cause and provide
against its recurrence. Voltaire has said, in his rather com-
pendious way, that " the beginning of wisdom is to know how
to doubt." It might be said, I think, with less question, that
the beginning of knowledge is to know how to begin. It is
very confusing to the mind to start from the wrong end ;
and walking backwards is as helpless a process intellectually
as physically. You will permit an illustration which I flatter
myself that your philological classes at least will appreciate,
even if you deem it a little remote. At a meeting of the
British Association, in October, 1862, the contemporary
report of proceedings in the London Athenaeum will show
that the Rev. Dr. Mill read a very long and learned paper
concerning the "decipherment of the Phoanician inscription
on the Newton stone, Aberdeenshire." Having decided that
the letters were Phoenician, the reverend gentleman read the
inscription backwards, from the right, explaining it by corre-
sponding letters of the Hebrew alphabet. He thus made it
out to be a votive monument, dedicated to Eshmin, God of
Health (the Tyrian Esculapius), in gratitude for favors
received during "the wandering exile of me thy servant"
— the dedicator being "Han Thanit Zenaniah, magistrate,
who is saturated with sorrow." On its face, the mode of
decipherment had some signs of weakness to even a super-
ficial critic; and the conclusion of the inscription was rather
illogical, at least according to modern experience, in which a

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 243

saturation of sorrow does not usually crystallize, for a sick
man, into a monument of gratitude to his physician. Dr.
Mill, however, discussed the sufferings of Han Thanit at
some length, speculating upon their cause (which, I have
no doubt, was "malaria") and suggesting that he appeared
to have been a man of consular authority, who had com-
manded a fleet or ship, which had come to Britain ; and that
this and other circumstances pointed to the earlier period of
the history of Tyre.

Dr. Mill was followed by a certain Mr. Wright — obvi-
ously an iconoclast of fiendish malignity — who said, in a
quiet way, that the stone belonged to a familiar class of
monuments. The inscription was written, he said, not in
Phoanician, but in rudely-formed Roman characters, and
belonged to a period subsequent to the withdrawal of the
Romans from Britain. It was not easy to decipher it, he
said, without some study, and the drawing presented was
imperfect, but he thought he could sufficiently explain what
it was, and he read it thus, beginning at the left : " Hie jacit
(jacet) Constantinus Jtlius * * * *" followed by other letters
easy to make out on careful examination. It was simply the
burial stone, he added, of some chieftain called Constantine,
and bore his name and that of his father. It was to be
lamented, said Mr. Wright, that Dr. Mill had thrown away
so much learning so mistakenly.

I have ventured to give this remarkable statement in almost
literal detail, because, apart from its point as an illustration,
it seems to me almost as humorous in its way, and as delight-
fully circumstantial in its humor, as if Swift himself had
invented it. In my limited reading, I do not remember to

244 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

have met a thoroughly authentic report of any like occurrence
in a learned society. Doubtless, many a Han Thanit may
have been accredited to Tyre, and never found out to be a
Roman ; but, if the incident which I have described is at all
characteristic of the proceedings of the British Association,
there may well be said of it, what Lord John Townshend
said of the House of Commons, when the celebrated gram-
marian, James Harris, the author of " Hermes," was taking
the oaths of office. You will doubtless recall the story.
" Who might that be ? " said Lord John. Some one replied
that it was Mr. Harris, " who had written on grammar and
harmony." " Then, why the deuce," cried Lord John, " does
he come to this place, where he will hear so little of either ? "
From this illustration of what learning comes to, when it
begins at the wrong end, we may well point the moral of
what ignorance or half learning will end in, if it undertakes
to be its own guide in research. The desire to know being
the parent of all knowledge, men constantly persuade them-
selves that such desire and the willingness to work are all
that is necessary for the attainment of their object. How
many industrious and worthy lives are comparatively wasted
under that mistake — in squaring the circle, or such like — it
is difficult to estimate. Undoubtedly, the man who looks at
the sun through a smoked glass, may have as ardent a desire
to understand the phenomenon which his rude instrument
discloses, as the astronomer who sails his thousands of miles,
to plant his telescope on some wild mountain, or some lone
island in mid-ocean. But not all the enthusiasm which ever
lifted a man's face towards the heavens will teach him even
"the sweet influences of the Pleiades," or make him know

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSI1Y. 245

that " the bands of Orion " cannot be loosed. The Chaldaean
system of instruction through the sheepfold has gone out of
vogue, and the moon of our nights comes down to Endymion
only through the lenses. The sum and substance of all sci-
ence is fact; and the student, who does not know what
research has already disclosed, cannot possibly know where
the research of to-morrow should begin. His danger, if
ill-directed or without direction, will always be, that he will
soon forget the stake in the excitement or amusement of the
game, and ultimately subordinate finding to seeking. It will
be the familiar case of the collector, who begins with a taste
or a love for pictures, or prints, or books, and ends with the
uncontrollable and fruitless passion for mere collecting. To
prevent the waste and abuse of intellect and effort, the abor-
tive struggle, the disappointment and defeat which come from
imperfect teaching and the self-sufficient helplessness of undis-
ciplined thought, is the high and special function of such
educational authority as only a great university can wield.
Wherefore, over and above the tending of its own fold, I find
especial reason for rejoicing in the standards and methods
which this university will establish and maintain among us,
and in all our institutions of learning, by the authority of its
example and position, and by the sheer and downright force
of its intellectual preponderance. And when I speak of pre-
ponderance, it is of a superiority, not vaunted but frankly and
generously recognized — an authority not less efficient, because
founded on good feeling and respect, and exhibited in co-opera-
tion rather than control.

[Addressing Judge Dobbin.'] — To you and me, Mr. Presi-
dent of the Board of Trustees, and to some of your co-workers,

246 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY.

these things of even the near future, though visible enough
and bright, have something of the light which comes to
men, at evening, from beyond the sensible horizon where
the earth-line fades. There is, perhaps, in this, some touch
of sadness, but least of all, to one, like you, sir, who having
filled to the brim the measure of official usefulness and honor,
can still give to this great work and to the service of the
people who cherish you, the wisdom of age, the tempered
zeal of robust and high convictions, and the vigor of facul-
ties unimpaired.

NOTES.

PAGE 5.

When this address was printed for private circulation in 1867,
it was prefaced by the following note : —

The Essay which follows was written for the Mercantile Library
Association of Baltimore, before which it was read in the Spring
of 1859. Since the edition published by the Association was
exhausted, I have been repeatedly called upon for copies. These
requests, to my surprise, have been especially frequent of late,
and have been most kindly urged, by gentlemen of intelligence,
in various parts of the country. I have been led to believe,
under the circumstances, that the reproduction of the Essay may
possibly lead to good, and I have therefore printed it anew for
private distribution.

The last few years have afforded many illustrations, by which
sad and effective point could be added to the views which I have
endeavored to enforce. They have likewise hastened, so precipi-
tately, the ordinary march of events, that I have been tempted to
remodel some things which now seem as if they had been written
half a century ago. But, on the whole, I have thought it wiser
to leave the text as it first appeared, with a few, simply verbal,
alterations.

S. T. WALLIS.

BALTIMORE, June, 1867.

PAGE 52, LINE 7.
Professor Nathan R. Smith [s. T. w.].

247

248 NOTES.

PAGE 65.

At a Meeting of the Trustees of the Peabody Institute of the
City of Baltimore, held on the 6th of November, 1869, the fol-
lowing Preamble and Resolutions were adopted :

WHEREAS, The telegraph brought to us yesterday morning the sad tid-
ings that our good friend and patron, George Peabody, died the night
before — at eleven o'clock on Thursday, the 4th of November, in London —
where he had recently arrived from a visit to this country, the Trustees of
the Institute have been convened to take a record of this event, and to
direct such proceedings as shall properly express the profound sorrow
which it inspires, and render suitable honor to the memory of the illus-
trious founder of the corporation that has been committed to their charge.
Therefore

Resolved, That in the death of George Peabody the civilized world has
lost one of its most generous benefactors, his country an illustrious citizen
whose active benevolence will long be remembered in the wise and noble
institutions which he has planned and founded for the good of the nations,
and his numerous friends on both sides of the Atlantic a most cherished
companion, whose life has been illustrated and adorned by the constant prac-
tice of the most conspicuous probity, charity and good will to mankind.

Resolved, That this Board have received the intelligence of his death
with an emotion rendered more poignant by their experience of the bene-
fits they have enjoyed, in their peculiar personal relations to him, as a
friend in whose intercourse they were accustomed to find a kindly and
effective co-operation in the performance of the duties assigned to them,
and the most valuable aid, both in council and resources, for the advance-
ment of the design of the Institute.

Resolved, That in token of respect for his memory the Institute be closed
until Monday, and that it be suitably draped with badges of mourning, to
be retained one month.

Resolved, That the Board make provision for a suitable eulogy on the
life and character of the deceased, to be pronounced in the Hall of the
Institute at a day hereafter to be determined, of which notice shall be
given to the public.

Resolved, That S. Teackle Wallis, Esq., be invited to deliver the eulogy
on the life and character of Mr. Peabody provided for in the foregoing
resolution.

NOTES. 249

Resolved, That a committee of three be appointed by the Chair to carry the
above resolutions into effect, and that they be also authorized to co-operate
with any public bodies, in the city or State, who may desire to unite with
the Trustees of the Peabody Institute in paying a proper tribute of respect
to the memory of the late George Peabody.

On the 15th of February, 1870, among the proceedings of the
House of Delegates of Maryland, was the following :

Mr. Hammond submitted the following message :

BY THE HOUSE OF DELEGATES,

February 16, 1870.
Gentlemen of the Senate:

We propose, with the concurrence of your Honorable Body, the appoint-
ment of a Committee, consisting of three on the part of this House, and
two on the part of the Senate, to invite the Hon. S. Teackle Wallis to
repeat his Eulogy on the Life and Character of George Peabody, in the
Hall of the House of Delegates, before the Governor, Court of Appeals,
and General Assembly of Maryland, at such time as he shall be pleased to
designate. We have appointed, on the part of the House, Messrs. Ham-
mond, Kilbourn and Streett.

By order, MILTON Y. KIDD,

Chief Clerk.

Which was read, assented to, and sent to the Senate.

In the Senate, on the same day, Mr. Earle submitted the
following message, which was read, assented to, and sent to the
House of Delegates :

BY THE SENATE,

February 16, 1870.
Gentlemen of the Souse of Delegates :

We have received your message proposing the appointment of a Com-
mittee, consisting of three on the part of the House, and two on the part
of the Senate, to invite the Hon. S. Teackle Wallis to repeat his Eulogy on
the Life and Character of George Peabody, in the Hall of the House of
Delegates, before the Governor, Court of Appeals, and General Assembly
of Maryland, at such time as he shall be pleased to designate, and heartily
concur therein. We have appointed, on the part of the Senate, Messrs.
Earle and Hyland.

By order, AUGUSTUS G ASS AWAY,

Secretary.

32

250 NOTES.

In response to this invitation, communicated to Mr. Wallis by
the Joint Committee, the discourse, originally delivered in the
City of Baltimore on the 18th of February, 1870, was repeated
by him on February 25th, in the Hall of the House of Delegates,
at Annapolis, before the Senate and House in joint Session, in
the presence of His Excellency the Governor of the State, the
Honorable Judges of the Court of Appeals, the Officers of Her
Britannic Majesty's Ship Monarch (then lying in Annapolis
Roads), and a number of ladies and gentlemen specially invited.

On the 26th of February, Mr. Touchstone submitted, in the
House of Delegates, the following resolutions which were unani-
mously adopted, and which received, in due course, the unanimous
concurrence of the Senate, viz :

JOINT EESOLUTIONS.

WHEREAS, the discourse upon the Life and Character of the late George
Peabody, which was yesterday pronounced by S. Teackle Wallis, Esq., in
the presence of the Senate and House of Delegates of Maryland, is, by its
just discrimination, its instructive and philosophical analysis of character,
and its lofty eloquence, entitled to rank amongst the most distinguished
orations of modern times, and ought, therefore, to be perpetuated and
handed down to posterity, with the other tributes paid by Maryland to
the memory of its immortal subject, — Therefore,

Resolved by the Senate and House of Delegates of Maryland, That the thanks
of the two Houses are hereby offered to Mr. Wallis, for his prompt accept-
ance of their invitation, and that he be requested to furnish a copy of his
discourse for publication.

Eesolved, That 2,000 copies of the said discourse be printed for the use of
the General Assembly.

The following correspondence thereupon ensued :

GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF MARYLAND,

SENATE,
ANNAPOLIS, March 3d, 1870.

Dear Sir : We beg to enclose the joint resolutions of the General Assem-
bly of Maryland, asking a copy of your classic and eloquent Eulogy on the
Life and Character of George Peabody, for publication. Having been

NOTES. 251

appointed a Committee to execute the wishes of the Legislature, we express
the hope that it may be agreeable to your views to comply with this request.
We have the honor to be, very respectfully, your ob't serv'ts,
ORMOND HAMMOND, JAMES T. EARLE,

E. G. KILBOURN, C. H. HYLAND,

J. M. STREETT, Of the Senate.

Of the House.
HON. S. TEACKLE WALLIS.

BALTIMORE, March 4«A, 1870.

Gentlemen: I have before me your flattering communication of yester-
day's date, enclosing me a copy of the resolutions which the General
Assembly of Maryland has been pleased to adopt, in reference to my recent
discourse upon the Life and Character of the late Mr. Peabody.

The terms in which the General Assembly has seen fit to characterize
the discourse so far transcend my own estimate of its possible merits, that
I should have much hesitation, under other circumstances, in submitting
it to the deliberate criticism of the public. But the manuscript is already
in the hands of the Committee of the Peabody Institute, for publication,
and I shall therefore take great pleasure in transmitting you the corrected
proofs as soon as they are ready.

Let me beg you to express to the General Assembly, in the warmest
way, my very grateful sense, not only of the high honor done me by its
official proceedings, but of the great personal consideration, courtesy and
kindness, which have left me under so many obligations to the officers,
Committees and Members of both Houses.

I have the honor to be, with great regard, truly yours,

S. T. WALLIS.

HON. JAMES T. EARLE, HON. ORMOND HAMMOND,

" C. H. HYLAND, " E. G. KILBOURN,

Committee of the Senate. " J. M. STREETT,

Committee of the House of Delegates.

PAGE 141.

The ceremonies attendant upon the unveiling of the Statue
erected by the State of Maryland, in honor of the late Chief
Justice ROGER BROOKE TANEY, took place in the Senate Cham-
ber, at Annapolis, at noon of December 10th, 1872. The Report
and Address of the Committee were read by the chairman, Mr.

252 NOTES.

S. T. Wallis, who in their name made formal delivery of the Monu-
ment to the Governor of the State. His Excellency, Governor
Whyte, responded briefly, and when he had concluded, the com-
pany proceeded to the grounds in front of the State House, where,
upon the order of the Governor, the statue was uncovered.

During the ceremony in the Chamber, the Governor occupied
the place of the President of the Senate, the Judges of the Court
of Appeals, with other prominent representatives of the Bench
and Bar of the State, being upon one side, and the Officers of
the Naval Academy, in full uniform, with Rear Admiral Worden
at their head, being seated on the other. His Excellency remained
standing during the delivery of Mr. Wallis' address.

PAGE 169.

BALTIMORE, June 7th, 1881.
Hon. S. TEACKLE WALLIS.

My Dear Sir: Permit me to inform you that the Board of Managers
of the Maryland Institute passed on the 6th of June a resolution in which
the Chairman of the Schools of Art and Design was requested to obtain
from you, for publication, a copy of the speech made by you on the 4th of
June at the Annual Commencement of said Schools.

As I hope that your very able and eloquent address upon that occasion
may stimulate some of our fellow-citizens to reflect upon, if not to follow,
the philanthropic suggestions contained in it, you will, by a compliance with
the desire of the Institute for its publication, much oblige,

Yours, very truly,

CARROLL SPENCE.

BALTIMORE, June 7th, 1881.
Hon. CARROLL SPENCE,

Chairman, &c.

My Dear Sir: In response to your letter of this morning, I have the
pleasure to send you, with this, a copy of my address, delivered at your
Annual Commencement, on the 4th of June. I appreciate the compliment
conveyed by the resolution of the Board, and shall be happy, if I have been
able to promote the interests of the Institute, or attract the attention of the
public to its claims upon their sympathy and support.

Very truly yours,

S. T. WALLIS.

POEMS.

POEMS.

THE BLESSED HAND.

For you and me, who love the light

Of God's uncloistered day,
It were, indeed, a dreary lot,

To shut ourselves away
From every glad and sunny thing

And pleasant sight and sound,
And pass, from out a silent cell,

Into the silent ground.

Not so the good monk, Anselm, thought,

For, in his cloister's shade,
The cheerful faith that lit his heart

Its own sweet sunshine made ;
And in its glow he prayed and wrote,

From matin-song till even,
And trusted, in the Book of Life,

To read his name in Heaven.

255

256 POEMS.

What holy books his gentle art

Filled full of saintly lore !
What pages, brightened by his hand,

The splendid missals bore !
What blossoms, almost fragrant, twined

Around each blessed name,
And how his Saviour's cross and crown

Shone out, from cloud and flame !

But, unto clerk as unto clown,

One summons comes, alway,
And Brother Anselm heard the call,

At vesper-chime, one day.
His busy pen was in his hand,

His parchment by his side —
He bent him o'er the half-writ prayer,

Kissed Jesu's name, and died !

They laid him where a window's blaze

Flashed o'er the graven stone,
And seemed to touch his simple name

With pencil like his own ;
And there he slept, and, one by one,

His brethren died the while,
And trooping years went by and trod

His name from off the aisle.

And lifting up the pavement, then,
An Abbot's couch to spread,

They let the jewelled sunlight in
Where once lay Anselm's head.

POEMS. 257

No crumbling bone was there, no trace

Of human dust that told,
But, all alone, a warm right hand

Lay, fresh, upon the mould.

It was not stiff, as dead men's are,

But, with a tender clasp,
It seemed to hold an unseen hand

Within its living grasp ;
And ere the trembling monks could turn

To hide their dazzled eyes,
It rose, as with a sound of wings,

Right up into the skies !

Oh loving, open hands, that give ;

Soft hands, the tear that dry ;
Oh patient hands, that toil to bless ;

How can ye ever die !
Ten thousand vows from yearning hearts

To Heaven's own gates shall soar,
And bear you up, as Ansel m's hand

Those unseen angels bore !

Kind hands ! oh never near to you

May come the woes ye heal !
Oh never may the hearts ye guard

The griefs ye comfort, feel !
May He, in whose sweet name ye build,

So crown the work ye rear,
That ye may never clasped be,

In one unanswered prayer !

258 POEMS.

A PRAYER FOR PEACE.

Peace ! Peace ! God of our fathers, grant us Peace !
Unto our cry of anguish and despair
Give ear and pity ! From the lonely homes
Where widowed beggary and orphaned woe
Fill their poor urns with tears ; from trampled plains
Where the brightest harvest Thou hast sent us, rots,—
The blood of them who should have garnered it
Calling to Thee — from fields of carnage, where
The foul-beaked vultures, sated, flap their wings
O'er crowded corpses, that but yesterday
Bore hearts of brothers, beating high with love
And common hopes and pride, all blasted now ; —
Father of Mercies ! not alone from these
Our prayer and wail are lifted. Not alone
Upon the battle's seared and desolate track,
Nor with the sword and flame, is it, O God,
That Thou hast smitten us. Around our hearths,
And in the crowded streets and busy marts,
Where echo whispers not the far-off strife
That slays our loved ones ; — in the solemn halls
Of safe and quiet counsel — nay, beneath
The temple-roofs that we have reared to Thee,
And mid their rising incense, — God of Peace !
The curse of war is on us. Greed and hate
Hungering for gold and blood : Ambition, bred

POEMS. 259

Of passionate vanity and sordid lusts,

Mad with the base desire of tyrannous sway

Over men's souls and thoughts, have set their price

On human hecatombs, and sell and buy

Their sons and brothers for the shambles. Priests,

With white, anointed, supplicating hands,

From Sabbath unto Sabbath clasped to Thee,

Burn, in their tingling pulses, to fling down

Thy censers and thy cross, to clutch the throats

Of kinsmen by whose cradles they were born,

Or grasp the brand of Herod, and go forth

Till Rachel hath no children left to slay.

The very name of Jesus, writ upon

Thy shrines, beneath the spotless, outstretched wings

Of Thine Almighty Dove, is wrapt and hid

With bloody battle-flags, and from the spires

That rise above them, angry banners flout

The skies to which they point, amid the clang

Of rolling war-songs tuned to mock Thy praise.

All things once prized and honored are forgot.
The Freedom that we worshipped, next to Thee,
The manhood that was Freedom's spear and shield,
The proud, true heart, the brave, outspoken word,
Which might be stifled, but could never wear
The guise, whatever the profit, of a lie ; —
All these are gone, and in their stead, have come
The vices of the miser and the slave, —
Scorning no shame that bringeth gold or power,
Knowing no love, or faith, or reverence,

260 POEMS.

Or sympathy, or tie, or aim, or hope,
Save as begun in self, and ending there.'
With vipers like to these, O blessed God !
Scourge us no longer ! Send us down, once more,
Some shining seraph in Thy glory clad,
To wake the midnight of our sorrowing
With tidings of Good Will and Peace to men ;
And if the star that through the darkness led
Earth's wisdom then, guide not our folly now,
Oh, be the lightning Thine Evangelist,
With all its fiery, forked tongues, to speak
The unanswerable message of Thy will.

Peace ! Peace ! God of our fathers, grant us Peace !
Peace in our hearts and at Thine altars ; Peace
On the red waters and their blighted shores ;
Peace for the leaguered cities, and the hosts
That watch and bleed, around them and within ;
Peace for the homeless and the fatherless ;
Peace for the captive on his weary way,
And the mad crowds who jeer his helplessness.
For them that suffer, them that do the wrong ;
Sinning and sinned against — O God ! for all —
For a distracted, torn, and bleeding land —
Speed the glad tidings ! Give us, give us Peace !

POEMS. 261

THE LAST OF THE HOURS.

Daughter of light ! thy gaze, methinks, is sad ;

Thy hooded vesture hath no bloom of flowers —
Why, 'mid so blithe a host, art thou not glad ?

What grief hath stung thee, fairest of the Hours ?

Is it that Heaven's own children, when their lot
Is bent to human circumstance, like thine,

Share the near sorrows which themselves have not,
And round the immortal brow earth's cypress twine ?

When at the couch of pain the morning calls,
Thou art the last to chase the fevered dream ;

When welcome night upon the weary falls,
Thine is the lingering, last, intrusive beam !

Of those that love and part, the vigils pale

Are they not thine ? — and thine the watcher's sigh,

As, with wet eyes, she sees the misty sail

Sink down, with thee, beneath the twilight sky ?

Hast thou not seen — nay see'st thou not, each day —
Youth, purity, and truth, and trust, depart —

Dreams vanish — struggles ended — hopes decay —
And change, cold as the grave, come o'er the heart ?

Thou too art Death's own hour — the dim, the dread —
In whose wan light his shadow creepeth o'er
34

262 POEMS.

The opening, awful pathway we must tread,
And the loved places we shall know no more.

Yet not all sad thy round ! The passing bell
Gives thee ofttimes sweet music as it rings —

There are deep joy-notes even in its knell,
For sorrow dieth, like the brightest things !

The dew that at the haunted even-tide

Thou weepest, as last mourner o'er the day,

Last Hour of night ! are not its tear-drops dried,
By the wild morning's first exultant ray ?

Though thine the woe of partings, know'st thou not —
Long absence over — joy come home anew ?

'Mid hopes and dreams that leave us, why forgot
Are anguish, doubt, despair, departed too ?

And e'en when life goes wasting, with thy sands,
And tears fall fast, and, in the noiseless tread,

The quivering whisper, the cold clasped hands,
And the wild prayer — half madness — may be read

Our mortal story's ending — even then

How oft, last Hour, is there a light that springs

Out of thy darkness, which the fears of men
Can dim not nor o'ershadow — but which flings

A glory, brighter than the noon-day's, round
The bed thou watchest, until grief and dread

POEMS. 263

Blaze into triumph, and the trumpet's sound
Swells high with welcome as it calls the dead !

Let then the daughter of old Chaos wear
The robe of shadows and the mantled brow !

Unbind thy tresses to the rosy air,

And to the Sun, with sunshine, answer Thou !

TEUTH AND EEASON.

How beautiful the fantasy

That warmed the brain of him of old —
The watcher of the midnight sky —

Who, as the stars above him rolled,
Untaught of dim Primeval Cause
And crowned will and sceptred laws,
Had glimpses of a spirit-band,

Careering through the trackless air,
Each shaping, with a giant's hand

The orbit of a blazing sphere !

A holier thought and not less bright

It is, that o'er the sands of time,
We walk not in the mystic light
Of Providence, far off, sublime,

Nor Fate, nor Chance, with baleful ray,
Kindles the lode-star of our way ;

264 POEMS.

But, that where'er our tents are cast,
Each hath an Angel by his side,

From the first life-sigh to the last,

His guardian, champion, friend and guide.

Such faith seems half idolatry

To speculation's earth-turned eyes,
But wo befall us, if we see

No truth save that in reason's guise !

The simplest child, in sun and storm,
Hath visions of God's awful form,
That dazzled science could not paint ;

And he, who bends to laws alone,
May mock the worship of the saint,

Yet kneel unto a graven stone !

The Heathen, when his fancy gave

Their deities to all things fair —
Set Neptune's trident o'er the wave,

And temples made of earth and air —
Had more of worship in his heart,
More of religion's better part,
Than he who dives in reason's well

For all the truth to mortals given,
And from its depths alone, will tell

The starry mysteries of Heaven !

I would not, that the dreams of old
Should veil again the wakened mind,

Nor mine their faith who idly hold
That to be wise we need be blind ;

POEMS. 265

But, when I see how darkly lie
The plainest things before mine eye,
That, with each turn of reason's wheel,

Falsehood and truth, both, upward go,
I can but think that what I feel
Is best and most of what I know !

BEAUTY AND FAITH.

The Painter turned him to the sky,
And, as he gazed, a cloud went by,

Whose purple seemed to fold
A vision, round whose golden hair
The morning stars a glory were,

And worshipped as they rolled.

Beneath his flashing pencil then
Grew forms of light, unknown to men,

And lo ! the canvas gleams
As if the Painter's hand had caught
The vesture of a seraph's thought

To robe immortal dreams !

Time hath not dimm'd them ! Pilgrims bow
Before that dazzling beauty now

As when, from opened heaven,
Rapt genius snatched its kindling ray,

266 POEMS.

And revelled in that glorious day
To inspiration given !

But he, the Painter, did he kneel
And in his own high phrensy feel

The awful, present God ?
Not so ! The shrine was poor and dim
Where faith, not beauty, lit for him

The path that angels trod !

Ah ! for ourselves indeed 'twere well,
If Love were part of Fancy's spell,

And all things bright were dear ;
If we could bless as well as build,
And Deity and worship filled

What temples we might rear !

In vain our hands shall altars raise,
Though meet they be for proudest praise,

And genius grave the stone ;
For howsoe'er the gods be shrined
That lure the incense of the mind,

The heart adores its own !

POEMS. 267

THE EXILE'S PRAYER.

He speaks ! The lingering locks, that cold

And few and gray, fall o'er his brow,
Were bright, with childhood's clustered gold,

When last that voice was heard as now.
He speaks ! and as with flickering blaze

Life's last dim embers, waning, burn,
Fresh from the unsealed fount of praise,

His childhood's gushing words return.

Ah ! who can tell what visions roll

Before those wet and clouded eyes,
As, o'er the old man's parting soul,

His childhood's wakened memories rise !
The fields are green and gladsome still,

That smiled around his sinless home,
And back, from ancient vale and hill,

Exultant echoes bounding come !

He treads that soil, the first he pressed,

He shouts with all his boyish glee,
He rushes to his mother's breast,

He clasps and climbs his father's knee ;
And then — the prayer that nightly rose,

Warm from his lisping lips, of yore,
Bursts forth, to bless that evening's close

Whose slumbers earth shall break no more !

268 POEMS.

Dark though our brightest lot may be,

From toil to sin and sorrow driven,
Sweet childhood ! we have still, in thee,

A link that holds us near to heaven !
When Mercy's errand angels bear,

'Tis in thy raiment that they shine,
And if one voice reach Mercy's ear,

That blessed voice is surely thine !

God of his fathers ! may the breath

That upward wafts the exile's sigh,
Rise, fragrant, from the lips of death,

As the first prayer of infancy !
Frown not, if through his childhood, back,

The old man heavenward seeks his way —
Thy light was on that morning track,

It can but lead to Thee and day !

THE FIRST GRAVE.

The city of the dead hath thrown wide its gates at last,
And through the cold gray portal a funeral train hath passed
One grave — the first — is open, and on its lonely bed,
Some heir of sin and sorrow hath come to lay his head.

Perchance a hero cometh, whose chaplet, in its bloom,
Hath fallen from his helmet, to wither on his tomb :

POEMS. 269

It may be that hot youth comes — it may be, we behold
Here, broken at the cistern, pale beauty's bowl of gold.

Mayhap that manhood's struggle, despite of pride and power,
Hath ended in the darkness and sadness of this hour :
Perchance some white-haired pilgrim, with travel sore oppressed,
Hath let his broken staff fall, and bent him down to rest.

But stay ! behold the sepulchre — nor age nor strength is there ;
Nor fame, nor pride, nor manhood, those lagging mourners

bear:

A little child is with them, as pale and pure as snow,
Her mother's tears not dried yet upon her gentle brow.

The step that tottered, trembling, the heart that faltered, too,
At the faintest sound of terror the infant spirit knew ;
The eyes that glistened tearful when shadowy eve came on,
Now show no dread of sleeping in darkness and alone.

And why, though all be lonely, should that young spirit fear,
Through midnight and through tempest, no shielding bosom

near?

Ere the clod was on the coffin — ere the spade had cleft the clod —
Bright angels clad an angel in the raiment of their God !

Green home of future thousands ! how blest in sight of heaven
Are these, the tender firstlings, that death to thee has given !
Though prayer and solemn anthem have echoed from thy hill,
This first fresh grave of childhood hath made thee holier still.
35

270 POEMS.

The morning flowers that deck thee shall sweeter, lovelier,

bloom

Above the spot where beauty like theirs hath found a tomb ;
And when the evening cometh, the very stars shall keep
A vigil, as of seraphs, where innocence doth sleep.

Sweet hope ! that when the slumbers of thy pilgrims shall

be o'er,

And the valley of death's shadow hath mystery no more,
To them the trumpet's clangor may whisper accents mild,
And bid them wear the garlands that crown this little child !

THE SPECTRE OF COLALTO.

I.

How many a gem hath Nature's hand
Flung o'er Italia's fallen land !
How bright the world she bids to bloom
Around old Empire's prostrate tomb !
Oh ! who, with patriot soul to dare,
Could gaze upon a land so fair,
Or list, as Nature's joy goes by
From vocal wood and echoing sky,
Or feel that yon ethereal dome
Hangs, ever cloudless, o'er his home,
And not — with hand upon his sword,
And " Rome and Brutus ! " for his word-

POEMS. 271

Fling off the chain that galls him now,
Bind once again about his brow
The laurel of the glorious past,
And, kneeling by some temple's wall,
Whose heavenless gods for vengeance call,
Swear that — unyielding to the last —
He will not shame his father's grave,
And live — a Roman and a slave !

Alas ! Italians brighter day,
Her glory's noon, hath passed away,
And, mindless of their country's wrong,
Her sons, with love and dance and song.
Now teach the stream of joy to swell
From matin chime to vesper bell.
But not upon their souls is thrown
The blight of luxury alone,
For there her throne hath falsehood made,
There vengeance bares the bravo's blade,
And men, for rights who dare not bleed,
Lurk armed for murder's midnight deed.
They too, the daughters of that clime,
How is their beauty linked with crime !
By passion's cunning taught to know
Affection's lightest ebb or flow ;
Familiar with each jealous wile,
Too prompt to seek for falsehood's guile,
Too apt, from any doubts, to prove
The frailty of the hearts they love,
They pass o'er life, as o'er a sea
Of bitterness and mockery ;

272 POEMS.

Too ardent for a world like this,
Too high in hope for earthly bliss !

Oh ! would ye know how dread the fate
That drinks the venom of their hate,
Go, hear it in the long wild cry
That echoes round Colalto's towers !
Go, ask it of the moonless sky
That on a woman's vengeance lowers !
Go, seek it where, from yon gray wall,
Now crumbles fast the stony pall
Of one whom, to her living grave,
Without a Christian rite to bless,
A woman's vengeance madly gave,
In her youth's prime and loveliness.
Bethink ye, when each mould'ring bone
Beneath your touch to dust hath gone,
That she, whose wreck before you lies,
Was radiant as her own bright skies
In brow and cheek, and form and air
As pure, as sunny, and as fair !
Methinks in yonder bower she stands,
Her lady's tresses in her hands,
And o'er her lips there plays the while
A lucid and a happy smile —
A smile so fraught with peace and joy,
By innocence so heavenly made,
So free from grovelling earth's alloy,
'Twere mournful it should ever fade.
Upon her face, with raptured mien,
Colalto's lord is fondly seen

POEMS. 273

To turn his eye's scarce smothered flame,

While now and then, by stealth, there came

A sigh which told how wild a guest

Had made its homestead in his breast.

The thoughts he dares not then to speak

Are burning on his swarthy cheek,

And on his lips, and o'er his brow,

The smile, the flush, to fever grow !

Unconscious of his lawless gaze,

With fairy hand she lightly plays

Amid her lady's flowing hair,

And smiling on, with that bright smile,

She seems as if no dream of guile,

No tainted thought, could enter there !

Alas ! across the mirror's face,
Her lady's jaundiced sight may trace
Where, true to life, reflected steals
Each glance her lord too ill conceals ;
And when she marks that maiden's eye,
And lip, so full of ecstasy,
Though bleeds her thrilling bosom, torn
In turns, by fury, hate, and scorn,
No word she speaks — but, ere the night
Hath half run o'er its dismal flight,
In yon deep, torch-lit vault, they say,
A deed is done which weary years
Of madness and repentant tears
Were all too few to cleanse away !

Why should we paint yon niche's shade —
The fainting form within it laid —

274 POEMS.

The hurried wall that o'er it rose —

The shriek that cursed its murderous close ?

When morning dawned 'twas bright as e'er,

But not amid the throng appear

Those charms which erst were wont to glow

So brightly in the pageant's show ;

And, though they searched the castle o'er —

Though every tongue in sorrow spoke —

Since that unhallowed morning broke,

The one they sought was found no more.

II.

What tyrant's hand, what stern array,
Can bolt, or bar, or dungeon find
To stay the soarings of the mind,
E'en when begirt with chains of clay ?
Then, when the dust hath found its own,
And, fetterless, the soul hath gone,
Shall not its angel-pinions wave
High o'er the darkness of the grave ?
And if there be some cherished scene
Where deathless memory lingers yet —
Some spot which green and bright had been
Before the sun of life had set ;
Or, if there be some withered spot
Beyond the grave yet un forgot,
Round which life's darker curtains hung,
O'er which her cloud had passion flung,
Then say — why, after life's sad close,

POEMS. 275

May Dot the spirit circle o'er,
As perfume haunts the faded rose,
The realms it blessed or cursed before ?
Why — when the noisy day hath past,
And midnight's shades are round us cast,
May not the soul delight to fling
The shadow of its silver wing
Around the mortal couch where those
It loved in life's dark vale, repose ?
To heal the mourner's wounded breast,
To soothe each waking grief to rest,
Or robed in godlike justice, throw
Its lightning on the guilty brow ?
May not the spark that never dies
Start from its ashes into flame ?
Uncalled, may not the spirit rise,
As erst the spell-bound prophet's came ?

Enough : the grave alone can tell
How fare the tenants of its cell,
And they who sleep or dream below,
Its secret realms alone may know.
But this they say, that human eye
Oft sees a maiden form go by,
When death or sorrow hangs its pall *
Around Colalto's guilty hall.
When danger haunts the bloody chase,
That form outstrips the courser's pace ;
By night, by day, that form is still
The shadow of some coming ill ;
And, ever robed in virgin white,

276 POEMS.

With marble smile and eye of light,

Hath been, through all its wav'ring state,

The herald of Colalto's fate.

Time hath not blanched a single hair

Of those which made that brow more fair ;

Not years on years have taught to die

The lustre of that fadeless eye !

Of her who spake that maiden's doom,

They know not now the mouldered tomb,

Nor seek they in what unseen shade

Her children's children's bones are laid ;

But when, at twilight's dreamy hour,

The huntsman spurs his lagging steed

To cross Colalto's haunted mead

Ere ghostlier still the shadows low'r,

If rustles by the evening air,

To Mary's throne he lifts his prayer,

That she who rules the twilight grove

Will shield him with a mother's love ;

Or crosses fervently his breast,

As o'er his path dim visions roll,

That He, who gives the weary rest,

Will calm that maiden's troubled soul.

POEMS. 277

IN FOKT WARREN.

The anchors are weighed, and the gates of your prison
Fall wide, as your ship gives her prow to the foam,

And a few hurried hours shall return you, exulting,

Where the flag you have fought for floats over your home.

God send that not long may its folds be uplifted
O'er fields dark and sad with the trail of the fight ;

God give it the triumph He always hath given,
Or sooner or later, to Valor and Right !

But if Peace may not yet wreathe your brows with her olive,
And new victims are still round her altar to bleed,

God shield you amid the red bolts of the battle,

God give you stout hearts for high thought and brave deed !

No need we should bid you go strike for your freedom —
Ye have stricken, like men, for its blessings, before ;

And your homes and your loved ones, your wrongs and your

manhood,
Will nerve you to fight the good fight, o'er and o'er !

But will ye not think, as ye wave your glad banners,
How the flag of Old Maryland, trodden in shame,

Lies, sullied and torn, in ttie dust of her highways,
And will ye not strike a fresh blow in her name ?
36

278 POEMS.

Her mothers have sent their first-born to be with you,
Wherever with blood there are fields to be won ;

Her daughters have wept for you, clad you, and nursed you,
Their hopes, and their vows, and their smiles, are your own !

Let her cause be your cause, and whenever the war-cry
Bids you rush to the field, oh ! remember her too ;

And when Freedom and Peace shall be blended in Glory,
Oh ! count it your shame, if she be not with you !

And if, in the hour when pride, honor, and duty
Shall stir every throb in the hearts of brave men,

The wrongs of the helpless can quicken such pulses,
Let the captives at Warren give flame to them then !

WOESHIP.

'Tis not in anthems that from builded fanes
Go up with smoke of incense ; in the wail
Of sorrow, or repentance, nor the cry
Of supplicating anguish — not in all
The prayers that living lips can syllable,
Nor in the throb of adoration mute,
That stirs the breathless spirit on the shore
Of the lone ocean, or when midnight's stars
Slow swing their ceaseless censers, or the flowers
And seasons lift our hearts to Him whose hand

POEMS. 279

Hath wreathed them all with beauty — not alone
In these or all of these, dwells there or speaks
The true, deep soul of worship ! Far, between
The God who made us and ourselves, there lie
Eternal depths of distance. Sad and ill
It were to bear, were there divinity
No nearer to us ! were the Patriarch's dream
Of steps of light that climbed from earth to sky,
With angels gliding o'er them, but a mist
Shaped by the brain of slumber ! Nay — there is
Divinity about us, and our earth
Hath, in some mortal shapes that walk it with us,
Creatures so full of Heav'n that prayer to them
Cannot be all idolatry ! They fill
The shrine — they wake the worship, and it soars
To where they stooped from. Unto them, we bow
The head in reverence, as Religion bends
When holiest names are uttered. On their souls
The shade of frailty seems to have been flung
But that they might not be too bright to bless
The upturned eyes of love. To them the clay
Is but the robe of beauty, as the cloud
That blushes in the dawn, or crimsons o'er
The sunset, or sends forth the flashing storm,
Is but the earth- wove mantle that the skies
Wear for our joy and wonder !

280 POEMS.

DKEAMS.

YOUTH.

I will to rest, for though the morn and all
The starry prodigals are flinging down
Their silver on the night, and all we see
Is bright, and soft, and peaceful, yet to me
Far dearer are my dreams ! Oh blessed gift,
From God to his loved children, that whene'er
Life's load is heavy on them, and the shade
Of waking woe is dark upon their souls,
There is a fairy garden in the realm
Of sleep, which they may seek, and there, amid
The blossoms of sweet flowers, the lulling flow
Of ceaseless fountains, and the siren chant
Of many-colored birds, may lay them down
And feel that life hath rest !

AGE.

Alas, Alas !

How is the eye of youth a glorious prism,
Through which plain light falls beautiful ! To me
There is no charm in dreams. I can recall
The night when, to my childhood's pillow, came
Green visions of the fields at early morn,
With dew and flower and fragrance — when I heard
In sleep, the voices of companions near,

POEMS. 281

That bade me wake to sport, and when my heart

Would quicken its weak beatings, as I saw

The charms that lit the morrow's fancied hours !

There was a change. The forms that flitted round

My couch were those of friends, or, brighter still,

Of those that I had learned to love, and then

Sleep's hours were peopled with more burning thoughts,

But not less joyous. Life then looked, in dreams,

As to a traveller, from a new-reached hill,

Glow the glad lands before him. All was near.

Soft hands were beckoning onwards ; glancing eyes

Flashed on the paths I followed, and there swelled

A larger, warmer being in my veins,

Till life was one fierce ecstasy ! There came

Another change. The visions of the night

Though gorgeous still, did seem to lead me on

With ruder and more anxious hand, and though

My way was onward, and obstruction fell

Before my touch, and still, as erst, my step

Was proud — scorn had locked hands with pride —

More heavily the birds did flit around

And o'er my path, with all the jewelled plumes

Fall'n from their wings. The earth was green, as yet,

And flowers still bloomed, but they had parted, too,

With their old fragrance. There was dust on all

The things I saw — the dust of strife and toil —

The breezes that had fanned me in the morn,

Were tempests now, and death was in their sweep !

Thus passed I on, until, by slow degrees,
In sleep's still landscape shade by shade began .

282 POEMS.

To glide across the fields. The flowers did droop,
And the grass withered ; nor could I distil
One balmy drop, save from the precious Past.
Then, as, in childhood's dreams, the Future sate
Upon a starry throne and bade me come ;
As, in my manhood's slumber, there abode
The eternal Present only — so the Past
Grave all its life to sleep. I felt, that though
The fruit was heavy on the limb, yet there
The leaf grew yellow by it, and the tree
Had lost the charm it wore when it was red
With bee-sipped blossoms !

Tell me not of dreams !

They are the sport of him who hath not known
The changes of his state. They are the song
Of him who hath not heard the requiem sound
O'er all that he loved best. They are the bow
Of promise to the eye which hath not seen
The sunshine from the bosom of life's cloud
Go fading, till the shadows made its tomb !
Speak not of dreams ! No dreams, no dreams for me !

POEMS. 283

LIFE.

Antonio. Then, why, my Lord,

I prithee tell me, dost thou frown at life,
Its joys, its hopes ? Why dost thou scoff at all
The brightness of its raiment, and with life
Compressed in most contemptuous bitterness,
So scorn the happiness that blooms around
Its devious pathway ? Surely, though its cup
Be not all sweetness, few there are, meseems,
Who may not drink from it a nectared draught ;
The toil-wrung hind — the very slave — may learn
It hath some cordial drops for his poor heart —
Then how, my Lord, dost thou, so doubly girt
With earth's most costly blessings, find it in thee,
To turn thy spirit from them, veiling it
In this so black and causeless melancholy ?

Carlos. Thou speak'st of that thou know'st not. Cause

there is

For all who ponder on the breath they draw,
To fling light-hearted laughter from their lips,
No more to play there.

Midnight, now, it is,

And yonder rides the mild autumnal moon,
Without a cloud upon her lustrous brow —
Dost thou believe my heart so cold, that thence
The pulses leap not wildly, when I see

284 POEMS.

So mirrored there eternal love and power ?

Too warm, alas, the current springs, to fill

Each thrilling vein ! but, chilled again, shrinks back

When I do mind me of the wretched dust,

They say yon splendor beams for ! What a world,

And what a Heaven, for what a paltry worm !

Antonio. Nay, chafe not thus, but rather let thine age
Go revelling o'er the Paradise whose sheen
Is glorious around ! The hand that laid
Each shadow and each blaze of this fair light,
So wondrously, on such a wondrous world,
Did it not frame a meet inhabitant
For this so goodly mansion ? Out on thee !
That thou would'st drag the withered leaves to sight
And hide the blossom and the fruit of life !

Carlos. Speak not of withered leaves ! At this lone hour,
When silence hath his finger on the lips
Of Earth and all the earth-born, as I list
Where from yon tree, whose dappled foliage gleams,
Half sere, half verdant, in the doubtful light,
Drops rustling, here and there, the frequent leaf —
The thought comes o'er me, that this gloomy time
Is but the image of my life-time's hour ;
And I remember me of all who now,
Have fallen, withered, from the tree of fate,
And left me lonely.

Antonio. Is it wise, my Lord,

To dwell in sorrow, for that Death hath pierced

POEMS. 285

Loved hearts ere thine ? Nay, nay, if life be full,
As thou wouldst deem it, of overwhelming woes,
'Twould seem a kindness, that his iron hand
Should snatch us from them.

Carlos. Kindness, sure, — to leave

In solitude of anguish, those that weep
A portion of their better being gone —
To burst, at brightest and most festive hours,
Into the glowing chambers of the breast,
And leave them cold and tenantless ! Nay more
And worse — while, thus, the good and true
Are, like the topmost flowers, the first that fade,
Are there not left enough, of these with whom
Communion would bring loathing, to be round
Our troubled way — and ever some, to whom
The tendrils of our hope have learned to cling
But to be blasted ? Kindness this, that makes
Death and the terrible dark doubts beyond
Come welcome as his slumbers to the slave !

Antonio. Fll not dispute with thee, that life is all
One day of sunshine. It hath clouds, as hath
The fairest child of summer, but why make it
E'en worse than winter, ceaseless in its storms ?
If thou wouldst live for happiness, then turn
Thine eye upon life's brightness, as the gaze
Of the proud eagle ever seeks the sun,
Nor heeds the mists that flit before his wing.
I will not mind thee of the threads of gold
37

286 POEMS.

Fate yet might spin thee, were her rolling wheel

Urged on with hopeful hand. Yet — answer me !

In youth's untroubled spring-time, even when

The storms of manhood's summer rolled about thee —

Hadst then not those — nay, shrink not — was there one

The unyielding marble of whose truth did speak

Heaven's music to thy love, as Memnon's lips

Blushed into harmony at morning's gaze ?

Say this is past — yet has thy heart forgot

The bliss that warmed it then ? E'en now, its glow

Gives mem'ry life !

Carlos. True, true ! — Behold enough

To make thee weep the folly of thy frowns —
To wipe away the blot which pain hath thrown
On life's succeeding page ! A single star,
Seen though it be far as the walls of Heaven,
Will make night beautiful to him whose eye
Looks out for beauty ! One remembered joy,
How will it turn a wilderness to bloom !

Carlos. Alas, Antonio, there is little cure
In memory. 'Tis but an ancient lute
Whose strings are broken, or, unbroken, yield
How poor a melody for that which erst
Rang thrilling o'er them. I have turned to fame,
To wealth and power and beauty, but I have
Grown old vain-seeking happiness, and all
Comes with an empty sound upon mine ear.
And for the dreams — the phantoms — memory raises —

POEMS. 287

So cold, so fleshless are they, and each points
Its Parthian arrow with so dread an aim —
God grant there were no seer to bid them rise !

Antonio. Has Heaven not made thee with a mind that, firm
In its unbending reason, dares to soar
Above the trembling empire of the heart ?
Art thou so weak, that every woe will bend
Thy spirit as the breezes toss the light
And pensile willow ? Thou, who art a man,
Shouldst wear thy manhood as a hardness round thee,
And smile at sorrow, as at outward harm !

Carlos. Why call'st thou me a man, and yet wouldst have
Me fling my nature, callous, in the dust,
And bear me, as the brute, whom God hath made
Unreasoning, unfeeling, void of all
That is humanity's best grace ? For me,
The thing that thou wouldst call philosopher
Is but a brute of his own making — worse —
In that he hath vain speech to boast him of
His brutish art, and pride, to let me know
How one made with some sparks of Heaven within him
Hath striven to be, altogether, clay !

Antonio. This is thy nature's weakness, not its strength,
Its godlike portion — that thou shouldst fall down
Before thy sorrows, as the traveller falls,
In the far Eastern desert, when the wild
Sand-cloud flits fire-winged o'er him. There are springs

288 POEMS.

Where life's sad pilgrims in its saddest wilds

May pause, and rest, and drink. To me, as thee,

Life hath not been a garden all of flowers,

But curst with weeds enough ; yet I adore

Deeply, though darkly, Him whose master-hand

Hath framed the chequered fabric of our fate !

And though, in everything, this tear-dimmed eye

See not His wisdom nor His goodness shine,

Yet, of their Heaven-blent union, everywhere,

One instant doubt I not. I cannot curb

The thoughts that spring within me, yet I feel,

And trust, and hear — as thou canst do, my Lord,

If that thou wilt — till silent suffering yields

A harvest of most unrepining peace.

Go see the wild — once desert, blooming now —

Where, in thy memory, desolation sat,

A voiceless queen ! Some solitary bird

Upon its barren bosom did let fall

The seed of bright flowers, from her passing beak-

Now all is beautiful, where all was waste !

So time will scatter fruit and fragrance o'er

The wildest solitude of heart — and thus,

As violets spread their perfume by our graves,

Will there spring up a sweetness from thy woe,

Will turn it half to happiness.

POEMS. 289

CHRISTMAS.

On the Swiss mountains, when I wandered there,

In the wild, awful passes, all alone,
A little cross of iron, cold and bare,

Rose, oft, before me, from some wayside stone.
Strange, uncouth names they bore — a holy sign

Traced by rude hands upon a rustic scroll,
And, blotted by the snows, a piteous line,

Begging our prayers for the poor sleeper's soul.

Some traveller it was, perchance, whose doom

The torrent or the avalanche had sped ;
Mayhap was buried there some peasant, whom

The hunted chamois o'er the cliif had led.
His simple thoughts had never crossed the sea,

From whose far borders to his grave I came,
Yet, as a brother, called he unto me,

And my heart's echo gave him back the name !

Peace to thy spirit, Brother ! I had felt

The quick'ning of the blood that wanderers feel,
At thought of home and country. I had knelt

At altars where the nations came to kneel —
But knew I never, in its depth, till when

Thy lonely shrine besought me for my prayer,
The sense of kindred with all sons of men —

One love, one hope, God's pity everywhere !

290 POEMS.

And so thy scroll, thou gentle Christmas-tide,

Reared on the cross, high o'er the wastes of time,
Speaks to earth's pilgrims, in His name who died,

Good will and peace and brotherhood sublime !
And, unto them that hail thee, chiefly worth

Are the glad wreaths thou twiuest round the year,
For that thou bidd'st our kindled hearts go forth,

Wherever love can warm or kindness cheer.

Up the bleak heights of daily toil we press,

Too busy, with our journey and our load,
To heed the hurried grasp, the brief caress,

The brother fainting on that weary road.
Then, welcome be the hours and thoughts and things,

That win us from ourselves, a little while,
To that sweet human fellowship, which brings

The only human joy unstained of guile !

CHRISTMAS— 1851.

As, o'er Judea's lonely world,
The Magi bore their gifts of gold

To Bethlehem, from afar,
Above the midnight path, there shone
Slow-guiding to the manger, on,

A dim receding star !

POEMS. 291

There came, that night, no starry ray
To where the watching shepherds lay,

But unto them was given,
With brow of light, and accents mild,
To tell them of the new-born child,

A messenger from Heaven !

'Twas strange that tidings, uttered then,
Alike for all the sons of men,

Should take such varying guise :
Here — music on an angel's tongue —
And there — the midnight clouds among,

Star- written on the skies !

Without the star-taught wizard's lore,
Without the gold and gems he bore,

'Tis mine, alas ! to see
Few, pale, and sad the distant rays,
The only guides to better days,

Sent down from Heaven to me !

Too far and cold to lead or bless,
Too few to light the wilderness

O'er which my path has lain —
They fade, like lamps that, waning, keep
The watches of a sick man's sleep,

Who only wakes to pain !

And, if an angel's form hath cast
A glory round me, as it passed,

292 POEMS.

And, ere it soared away,
Fve sprung to catch its raiment bright,
I have but clutched the pall of night —

The Seraph would not stay !

Would God ! Would God ! that I could fail
To read, in Bethlehem's holy tale,

The sorrow that it brings —
I would not make my star so dim,
And joyfully would catch the hymn

That any angel sings !

CHRISTMAS EVE AT SEA.

'Tis not thy wont, sweet festive Eve,
To come, with sunshine on thy brow ;

For frozen hands thy raiment weave,

And bind thy greenest wreaths with snow.

Yet never, in thy chillest guise,
So cheerless hast thou been to me,

As now, that I behold thee rise,
Here, on the wild and lonely sea.

Yet, though more dark the frowning sky
Should hang upon the solemn deep —

Though wildest were the revelry
The rushing blasts of winter keep —

POEMS. 293

All heedless still, of wave and storm,
The pilgrim's heart would beat full high,

If, of the host he loves, one form,

One heart, one hand, one smile, were nigh.

Bring him the hearth around whose blaze
His household gods give back the light ;

Breathe in his ear the mirth that plays
In happy echoes, there, to-night.

Show him the haunts where two or three

The festive midnight meet to bless ;
The quiet chambers, where there be

Dreams of the wanderer's caress ;

And into stars, the night that's o'er

His lonely watchings, shall be turned,
And thy sweet incense, as of yore,

E'en on the billows shall be burned.

Alas ! though summoned by thine art,

Around me, for brief moments, come
Visions so life-like that I start,

And wonder if it be not home.

'Tis vain ! all vain ! for round me roll

The self-same solemn waters, still,
The same sad skies brood o'er my soul,

The same wild breezes mock my will !
38

294 POEMS.

Yet, thou art welcome ! for there grow

Such blooming memories round thine hours,

That dark must be the wave of woe
Thy coming cannot crest with flowers.

And so, I bless thee, for the Past,

Whose brightest moments have been thine,

From childhood's playthings, to the last
Warm pledges in the Christmas wine !

And still more fondly will I greet
Thy next glad coming, if that then

The pilgrim's sandals shall be off my feet
The staff laid down, and I at home again !

TO AN INFANT.

"THE LORD GAVE."

Thou hast been born to breathe a softer air

Than Fate e'er won, from kindest skies, for me,

And, were there blessings waiting on my prayer,
God hath no angel but should bend o'er thee !

But there's a heart, quick beating, by thy side,
Whose very pulse is worship. Night and day,

Unconscious, from its throbbing, upward glide
Wishes too pure for Heaven to turn away.

POEMS. 295

No vows on high then need'st thou for thy weal,
Nor in this lower world a shield. Thy life

Hath only love to wait on it. The wheel
That, for the most of us, o'er toil and strife

Eolls its sad round, for thee can scarcely turn

From good, except to better. For the sake
Of her who bore thee, many a heart will yearn,
Though thou shalt know it not, from thee to take

Thy burden and to bear it. For the love
Of him thou shalt call father, many a hand

The stones and thorns from out thy path shall move,
And hopes, like sentinels, shall round it stand.

Joy be thy welcome then ! and — for the woes

That, on the best beloved and the best,
Fall — when and wherefore not the wisest knows,

Nor, knowing, could overmaster — let them rest

Until their hour shall come. The cup of earth
Hath not pearls melted, alway, in its wine ;

And happier, thou, than child of mortal birth,
If bitterness be not the most of thine.

But that thou can'st not rule. It is for Fate
To mix the draught — we quaff it, as we can.

Drink of it, humbly, if she pledge thee great ;
But, great qr humble — drain it like a man !

296 POEMS.

"AND THE LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY."

I turn the vacant pages o'er and o'er,

And fain would read them, but my eyes grow dim,
And thought and heavy heart go back to him

So wearily, that I can strive no more.

I see him now, as when he climbed my knee,

But yesternight, and round me played and clung
I hear the little busy merry tongue

Lisping the winsome music of his glee ;

And, as a garden sunbeam, dewy-bright,

I feel the glow upon me, of the smile

That kissed his innocent sweet lips, the while

He bade me, as he went, his glad Good Night !

Was it forever ? When the shadows fall

To-morrow and to-morrow — desolate
Around the silent hearth-stone shall we wait,

Vain listening his light footstep in the hall ?

From out the midnight voices seem to say

Life's star was setting when it seemed to rise,
And what we thought its brightness in the skies

Was but its blending with the perfect day !

When thou didst come among us, all unknown,
I gave thee welcome for thy parents' sake,

Nor dreamed, fair child ! how soon there should awake

7

Longings and griefs within me for thine own.

POEMS. 297

Yet, as, from day to day, their opening flowers

Beauty and hope about thy brow entwined,
And, from the roseate dawning of thy mind,

Love walked with thought adown the kindling hours,

Till every grace I saw upon thee grow

Was so made up with tenderness and mirth,
So full of joy and gentleness, that earth

Knew not its part in thee, 'twas brightened so —

I could but bless thee. Hearts unfilled will crave
The bliss they may not covet, and the grief
Is mine, not borrowed, now, that span so brief

Was all betwixt thy cradle and thy grave.

Good Night, my gentle boy ! No dream of pain
Or sin or haunting sorrow waits on thee —
Thou art set free from thy captivity,

Without one memory of its broken chain.

Good Night, and to thy rest ! There will be tears

Shed over the first-born, and there will cleave
Unto the bruised hearts thou seem'st to leave,

The anguish of the love that bleeds and bears.

But yet not always. In their lonely home

Tidings shall be, as from the dead that sleep ;
And a child's whisper, when they else would weep,

Shall breathe the message — " Suffer him to come ! "

298 POEMS.

MEMNON.

When soft, on Memnon's lips, of old,

The sunset's fading glory fell,
Though answering music from them rolled,

'Twas but the sighing of farewell :
If ever from the radiant stone

The notes of love and rapture broke,
'Twas morning's blessed beam alone,

The wild, impassioned song that woke.

Though 'tis not mine, as yet, to know

The dimness of the waning day,
Nor quite forgotten is the glow

That purpled o'er my morning way,
Yet, even when my soul is stirred

By what were ecstasy before,
The calmer hope and colder word

Now catch the olden flush no more.

'Tis strange — it may be sad to see,

And 'tis, to feel — I know not why —
There were no beauty on the lea,

Were there no changes in the sky ;
And though my heart, like Memnon's tongue,

Wakes not at noon its morning strain,
There's music in it, yet unsung,

Will greet the light it loves again !

POEMS. 299

GOD'S ACRE— FRIEDHOF.

Though I may long and hope, nay, fondly trust —
Yet know I not that Heaven will deign to keep,

Round the sin-tainted field of human dust,
Merciful watchings over all that sleep.

Nor know I when the waking hour shall be,
Nor what shall dazzle the rekindled eye,

When the rent veil of the grave's mystery
Hideth no more the life that may not die.

But, humbly, this at least, meseems I know,
That, when the clod shall lie upon my breast,

Though there be lonely truce to joy and woe,
Yet, lacking both, I still shall be at rest.

Then, by the lowlier name be mine to call
The silent spot where toil and yearning cease ;

I pray it be God's Acre unto all,

Blest, if to me it be the Vale of Peace !

STARLIGHT.

Glad watching his, who, when he turns
Unto the kindled lights of even,

By every star that o'er him burns
Sees but a nearer path to Heaven !

300 POEMS.

Poor dweller in the valley, he

To whom the midnight tells no story,

Save of dark distances that be

Betwixt him and its fields of glory !

Ah ! blessed orbs ! shall I not gaze,
Some time, upon the blue above me,

And catching in your dewy rays
The tenderness of eyes that love me,

Feel that the skies are near indeed,

When creatures good and bright beside us,

Part of the Heaven to which they lead,
Will share it with us, as they guide us !

QUO FATA TKAHUNT.

Have I not flung away already more

Of hope, and love, and anxious heart, and peace,
On thought of others — ten times o'er and o'er —

Than I have left? And should not such things cease?

Oh ! God that made me ! wherefore formed was I,
So full of things opposed, so clear to see

Behind each folly, pain, its shadow, lie,

Yet sure to walk just where the shadows be?

Who hath had teachings more than I have had ?

Who, for such lessons, hath a sense more keen ?
Who hath had more of grief from what was sad,

Or turned, more fated, back to what had been ?

POEMS. 301

Is it my sin, or shame, that I do tread,

In spite of knowledge, paths of pain foregone ?

Or hath some judgment fallen on my head,
That I shall see, and know, and yet go on ?

FOE AN ALBUM.

The fairy scene the painter's hand

Here spreads before the eye,
Speaks loudly to us of the land

Where life's strange travels lie.

Here, coldly see the hill-top gleam
Where fame and fortune climb ;

There, humbly sings the glowing stream
Its lowly, cheerful chime !

The woodland king, here, spreads his arms,

In pride of leafy power,
And there, as lifelike, blush the charms

Of yonder peasant flower.

And mark ye not what o'er them throws

The joyous smile they wear,
Without whose kissing, tree and rose

Would vainly woo the air?
39

302 POEMS.

It is the glorious sunlight's ray
That blesses wood and cloud,

The streamlet near, and, far away
Hallows the mountain proud !

So rays there are, without whose glow,

The field of human fate,
Alike its hills, and valleys low

Are cold, sad, desolate.

It is the sunshine of the heart,
And he, who reads aright,

Will find this holy lesson start
From every flash of light.

Treasures are wealth and wit and power,

And beauty and renown ;
In wisdom's scale, one heart-warm hour

Would weigh a worldful down !

FOR AN ALBUM.

Behold ! where, borne on gilded wing,
Yon fair and fluttering insect thing

Flies to the open flow'r ;
Blind to the future as the past,
Resolved, while sweets and sunshine last,

To revel through its hour.

POEMS. 303

'Tis not for me, the moral old,
By saints and sages better told,

From this poor insect's lot ;
How that, with all its purple gone,
The beauty which at morning shone,

At even-tide is not.

With gayer faith, the poet deems
It is not ill, to love our dreams

Of brightness and of bloom —
That blossoms would not hang so fair,
That fragrance would not load the air,

Were life all meant for gloom !

So too, he thinks yon silly fly
May not, all useless, flutter by

To those who see aright ;
And that a life amid the flowers,
May, longer than the moth's, be ours,

More happy, not less bright !

It is — that through our live-long day,
We should, unyielding, wing our way,

By no false brightness led,
And only give our pinions rest,
When lighted on the fragrant breast

Of buds from pure earth fed.

Not dazzling here and flitting there,
Our pride to glisten everywhere,

Mid noon-day's gaudy crowd ;

304 POEMS.

But ever seeking fresh to sip
The dew whose sweets will cool the lip,
Alike in glare and cloud.

The insect on our page must die,
Because the bud he flutters nigh

Is cut from parent bough !
And though its painted bosom gleam,
In spite of nature's brightest beam,

The blight is on it now !

Then let us ne'er life's blossoms prize,
Because their beauty lures our eyes ;

But rather be our art,
To tend alone the flow'rs that blow
On healthful stems that greenly glow,

Unsevered from the heart !

DEJECTION.

Oh God ! to see the swelling stream
Of happiness roll on —

To count the blessed barks, that gleam

In morning's flush and evening's beam,
Each on its journey gone ;

And feel that, by the lonely shore,
Mine creeps, a laggard, still,

POEMS. 305

While not a breeze that blew of yore
Comes back, with freshness, as before,
Its drooping sails to fill !

Oh say not to me, to deride,

That, of that better day,
In waste, in passion, or in pride,
Unmindful of the fleeting tide,

I flung the hours away !
Not mine the weakness or the sin

Of golden chances spurned —
To toil and hope is not to win ;
We end not all that we begin,

Nor gather all we've earned !

There's not a poisoned seed we sow,

Of folly or of crime,
But, surely, will to rankness grow,
And bear its certain fruit of woe,

In its appointed time :
But, from the germs of better things

We planted in our youth,
How few the flowers that Summer flings,
How rare the fruit that Autumn brings,

To bless our trust and truth !

Men hold it ill, at Fate to rail,

When all is ruled by Heaven ;
But when, e'en at our best, we fail,
And, trim we as we will our sail,

On rocks and shoals we're driven —

306 POEMS.

Though we may feel 'tis Heaven's high plan,

And bend beneath our lot,
Yet, if we be no more than man,
Resigned we may be, if we can,
Contented we are not !

TO A FRIEND.

Oh ! say not that the hearts we leave

Are but a transient home,
Or that to them our memories
Will, but as shadows, come ;
Nor tell me, tears for broken ties
Shall always dim the mindful eyes

Of those who loved us here ;
Nor that oblivion's chaunt should be
Our requiem for eternity,

Lest hate, rememb'ring, sneer.

Small need there is, I own, to try
The human hearts we have,

Their tenderness and truth, upon
The touchstone of the grave !

Falsehood but mocks us, if she pass

Before our pallid lips the glass,

To watch if breath be there;

POEMS. 307

When, of the years that blithest roll,
Each writes some record on the soul
Of vows that turned to air !

Yet, such things are, as faith and truth,

And hearts wherein they dwell —
And, if the living love such homes,

Why not the dead as well ?
If sin and woe no cloud can throw
On living love's unchanging brow,

Why need it be o'ercast
When we can wound and vex no more,
And time and death have mantled o'er,
All but the bright things past ?

The grief that awful parting wakes

Shall not for e'er abide ;
But 'tis not those who most forget,

Whose tears are soonest dried.
The tenderest heart is oft'nest glad :
Fond memory, not forever sad,

May muse, yet wear no frown :
Love passeth not away, with pain —
The dew may fade, yet still remain

The Heaven that sent it down !

No transient home is that, which love

Makes holy with its ray ;
Life's bounded moments are not all

That measure memory's day !

308 POEMS.

There is a sphere above the sun,
Where noon and night unsevered run,

And darkness never lowers ;
There, with no shadow on its face,
Save that eternal day-beams trace,

Love's dial counts its hours !

Then let me live, if live I may,

In hearts I leave behind —
And, if I may not fill the heart,

Oh let me fill the mind !
If love be mine, I ask not praise :
If love must die, then let me raise
Some stone to bear my name
So high above oblivion's hand,
That even they who sneering stand,
Shall feel and own 'tis fame !

Vain words ! Ambition's idle dreams

And hopes have fleeted by,
And time hath taught that glory's light

Shines not for such as I !
But welcome is the nameless lot,
If kindly thoughts forsake it not ;

And blest th' inglorious doom,
If but the few whose smiles I knew,
With olden memories bestrew

The else-forgotten tomb !

POEMS. 309

TO THE SAME.

Live we in the present ever ?

Eules the Spring the tides of time ?
Must our life be one endeavor
To persuade ourselves that never

Shall joy end beyond its prime ?

Though the past leaves many a token
That fond hoping may be vain,

And the words we've heard and spoken,

And the idols we have broken,

May not come to us again,

Yet, to doubt shall not restore us

Thought or feeling doomed to die ;

And to dread to look before us,

Lest a cloud, unseen, be o'er us,
Is a treason to the sky.

To be trembling o'er affections,

When they cluster thick and kind,

Greeting them with cold reflections,

On the chance of indirections,

Is to love with but the mind !

Every season a new glory

To the poet-heart will bring ;
And it is not true, the story
40

310 POEMS.

That all good is transitory,

Like the gladness of the Spring.

Then our fancies are unruly

When they whisper " Change is near
And we live not well or truly,
But we scan our joys unduly,

If we greet them but in fear.

Neither man nor earth should sorrow

That the flowers must pass away ;
For the year will surely borrow
Golden harvests for to-morrow,

From the seed-time of to-day !

TO A FRIEND.

We may have bliss, in after days,

For life hath often plenty,
And joy hath just begun its blaze

When we are one-and-twenty.

But with its joy, life brings its care —
Bright suns go down in sorrow ;

The brow that's glad to-day, may wear
A veil of woe to-morrow.

POEMS. 311

The hands that grasp, the lips that smile,

In after days deceive us ;
And many a web of darkest wile

The best beloved may weave us.

Then, let us bid old Memory fling

Her robe of jewels o'er us ;
Let's pledge our life's unclouded spring

With all the flowers it bore us.

Dream of the chase at break of day

Along the laurelled mountain,
And bless the moments when we lay

Cool by the noon-tide fountain.

Let's think of when we watch'd the sun

Go down in golden glory,
And how the moonlight's magic won

Our hearts to song and story !

The feast, by sportive toil made sweet,

Shall spread itself before us,
And fancy twine each sylvan seat

With the old boughs bending o'er us.

But most, when Memory backward throws

Her glances, may she guide us,
Unchanged, unchanging, back to those

Whose hearts then beat beside us !

312 POEMS.

They happier made each happy day,
And shall we not remember

The friends who cheered our sunny May,
E'en in our bleak December ?

NO MORE!

A child was born, as midnight's clang

Upon the heavy silence fell,
And round the chamber voices rang

More solemn than that awful bell :
One only burden, sad, they bore —
" No more ! no more ! "

The tears on childhood's cheek are dry,

For those who watched life's opening flower,

And brightly gleams, in youth's wild eye,
The sunlight of hope's reigning hour.

Clouds come — change — parting — as before,
Life shines no more !

Bend yonder gentle bough aside,

And look ye, where, in saddened grove,

Lips beautiful in scorn, deride

The humble vow ! The beam of love

That gilded life's cold mountains o'er,
Hath gold no more !

POEMS. 313

See where the world-worn man, alone,
At tearful eve, from crowd and strife

Unto his silent hearth hath gone,
And poiseth there the scales of life !

The blossoms of the time of yore,
Now bloom no more !

And to that thoughtful hour he brings
The memories of yearnings past ;

He hears Ambition's failing wings,
Receding, beat the distant blast ;

And, high, the tempest's echoes o'er,
Still rings — " no more ! "

Ay, gather up the hope, the joy,

The love, the friendships, all that gave

Green paths before him to the boy,

And sparkling crest to manhood's wave,

While they and all the bliss they bore
Return no more!

Go seek ! ah, no — why seek the woe
That feelings wrung have always nigh ?

Go crop the bitter weeds that grow

Each blasted hope's cold gravestone by,

And mark how sorrow's withered store
Grows evermore !

Yet, though 'tis true the forms we love
Cannot be always by our side,

314 POEMS.

And, as along the beach we rove,

Where ebbs and flows life's restless tide,
We see glad barks that leave the shore
Come back no more !

Still, let us feel that though, awhile,

Sweet hours, sweet friends sail down the stream,

There is a far but joyous isle

Where turns to truth hope's wildest dream,

And, reaching those who went before,
We part no more !

Thus thought the failing, gray-haired man,
And dropped his staff, one autumn day ;

Joy flashed across his visage wan,
As those old voices, now grown gay,

This altered burden chanted o'er :
" Sorrow no more ! "

THE CURFEW.

Ah why, when life's dim eve comes on,
Should hearts, once warm, grow cold ?

And why should sighs for feelings gone,
Make up our breath when old ?

POEMS. 315

'Tis true, the happy light that fell
On board and hearth, of yore,

Went out when evening's tyrant bell,
The Curfew's warning bore.

But oh ! it is not thus the heart
Should hear the voice of time ;

Not thus its cheerful light depart
At sound of evening's chime !

For me, kind fate ! forbid that e'er

That dismal tocsin toll,
In whose sad discord I shall hear

The curfew of the soul !

MIDNIGHT.

Ah ! now at last, with tears, I own
Far happier were our lot,

If we could wander on, alone,
Forgetting and forgot.

The thrill of joy that others feel,
When full our blessings flow —

The heart, that kindles at our weal,
And saddens in our woe—-

316 POEMS.

The fresh, warm glow of sympathy

That for our bliss is given,
To gild our clay-born destiny

With radiance lit in Heaven —

All these may teach — as they have taught —
That as life's waves we press,

The blithest bark bounds on for nought,
That sails in loneliness !

But yet, to feel that Fate may wind
Our thread of life round those

Who make our union with our kind
A talisman of woes ;

That when, before our gladdening eyes,
Life's broadest fields grow green,

Another's voice may bid arise
Some blinding mist between ;

That not a moment may fleet on,
Without some sound of sorrow ;

Sad yesterday's prophetic tone
Suggesting sad to-morrow !

And, worse than all, when duty stern
Bids the wrung heart be still,

Though memory cannot break her urn
Nor dry its bitter rill :

POEMS. 317

When love has ceased, we thought would flow

Till time should waste its wave,
And trust 's forgot, that should not know

Oblivion in the grave —

These, these are pains not all the bliss

Of sympathy can cure ;
And to be rid of life like this,

What might we not endure ?

To fly from these, we might forego

The grasp — the fond embrace,
And, rather than this madness know,

Know never Joy's bright face.

Oh God! Oh God! let not thy wrath

So cloud my vision o'er,
That finding midnight round my path,

I look for light no more !

THE FOUNT.

When by the margin of the stream,
The traveller rests him on his way,

'Tis not to watch the dancing beam,
Or catch the glitter of the spray ;
41

318 POEMS.

And if, unto his fainting lip,

The fresh bright waters cooling bring,

Why should he pause before he sip,
Or curse it for a worthless thing ?

Or why, with loathing, should he start
Because there 's earth beneath the tide,

When all the life that warms his heart
Is the same clay, scarce purified ?

Oh spurn not then the stream of love,
Because the earth looks dark below !

Content thee with the skies above,

In whose warm blaze the ripples glow !

And bless thee for the kindly fate,
Which to thy pilgrim soul hath given

A fount its purest thirst to sate,

Which springs from earth, but mirrors Heaven !

TO

I cherish yet this lifeless flower :

'Twas bright and fresh, with bloom like thine,
When thy soft hand in thoughtless hour,

Half flung it, careless, into mine \

POEMS. 319

There was no glance from thee that threw
A single beam upon my way ;

No word from whose sweet tone I drew
Just presage of a happier day ;

Yet 'twas thy gift, and cold and few
As were to me hope's fitful gleams,

At thought of thee bursts forth anew
The radiance of my brightest dreams !

I kept the flower, 'tis faded now,
And, fading like it, droop and fall,

As blossoms from a blasted bough,
My future's trust, my dreams, my all !

These withered leaves — there is no spell
Their beauty's blush can e'er restore, —

Sweet lady, pardon ! thou canst tell,
If hope for me shall bloom no more !

TO

More dark than winter's darkest cloud,
Compared with purity like thine,

The sin whose daily shadows shroud
Poor, tempted, toilsome lives like mine!

320 POEMS.

Though in my better moments rise

Thoughts, feelings, hopes of holier aim,

Too oft — like meteors from the skies —
They flash, fall, vanish as they came !

Dear lady, then, in happy time,

Was that sweet promise breathed by thee

That with thy vows a prayer should climb
And ask a boon from Heav'n for me.

'Tis said that when His Angels sue,
The Merciful bends down His ear :

Sweet lady, if the tale be true,

What blessings wait upon thy prayer !

TO

'Twas ill enough the pang to know
Of absence, distance, hope repressed,

Before a doubt had come to throw
New shadows o'er my clouded breast.

I felt that Time, too swift till then,
Must linger long on laggard wing,

Ere thy sweet smile could beam again
Upon me in the gladsome spring.

POEMS. 321

And, knowing that earth's hopes must wait

Upon a will they cannot bend,
I trembled at the thought that Fate

That happy hour might never send.

Yet I was blest that, come what might,

No absence, distance, change, delay,
Could dim the faith that, pure and bright,

Lit up thy heart with perfect day.

And though there came not to mine ear

The music of thy gentle voice,
Kind words might make the distant near,

And I might read them and rejoice.

It is not thus — not thus, that now
I count bright things as yet in store ;

Not thus recall each happy vow

Our eager lips breathed o'er and o'er.

Think not that I repent my trust,

As rashly flung upon thy youth,
For I will hold all faith as dust,

Ere I will doubt me of thy truth.

But, pure and gentle as thou art,

Believing all things what they seem,
Wilt thou not wound thine own kind heart,

Ere thou wilt break another's dream ?

322 POEMS.

Forbid to know how fondly dwells
Each heavy thought of mine on thee ;

To speed me here one thought that swells
Thy soul, or dims thine eye for me ;

And taught, perhaps, that, all unkind,
Some word, in pain or weakness spoken,

Shows feelings harsh and unrefined,
Rude vows, as rudely to be broken.

Ah, tell me — feeling, knowing this —
Can I forget we are of clay ?

Or weakly deem my promised bliss
Will surely dawn, because it may ?

Then blame me not if each sad hour
Chase but a sadder brother on —

If spirits, joyous once, have power
To wake no more sweet fancies gone.

Thou know'st that thou and only thou
Canst win back gladness to my side ;

Can I remind thee of no vow
To cherish me, whatever betide ?

POEMS. 323

TO

Sweet lady ! not in jest I said

That, all too bright to linger long,

With youth's swift hours from me had fled
My little gift of joyous song.

'Tis true 'twere folly, yet, for me
To talk of weariness and woe,

And feign to feel the vanity
And emptiness of things below.

•t O

But yet — look upward as we may —
The dust of toil and travel flings

A cloud upon the brightest day
That ever rose on purple wings.

And so the green earth wears not now
The freshness that " lang syne " I knew ;

The very beams that o'er it glow,
Have robbed it of its diamond dew.

And well-nigh spent, with me, the spell
That wins from life one-half its sorrow,

The heart which, if to-day goes well,
Beats careless of the dim to-morrow !

Yet, lady ! when I look on thee,

A brighter hue bright memories wear —

Thoughts, strangers long, come back to me,
And dreams, not baseless, throng the air.

324 POEMS.

Ah ! then I would were mine the art

That dwells in poesy alone,
To echo music from my heart,

Should be re-echoed from thine own !

'Tis vain ! I kneel not near the shrine,

A worshipper, as others are ;
And thou wilt prize these vows of mine

The more, that they are breathed from far !

A lover's lay be his, on whom

The sun-beams of thy smile descend !

Mine is the happiness — and doom —
To be, yet only be, thy friend !

ANGELS.

I would not make thee angel, if I could,
For I am yet content with earthly things ;

And 'twere, to me, a dubious sort of good,
Loving thee, as I do, to give thee wings !

I'm far enough, God knows, below thee, now,
Though thou art human, yet — to a degree —

But, were a glory set about thy brow,

What in the name of Heav'n would come of me ?

POEMS. 325

Spirits are radiant things, no doubt, to pray

And lift our hearts to, and none more than thine —

But that is worship merely — it needs clay
To link the mortal love with the divine.

I love the clay, I own — perhaps I have

Too little of the fire Prometheus stole,
And yet — I can but bless the Heaven that gave

The beauteous girdle which is round thy soul !

TO

I smile to think there have been times,
When I could write didactic rhymes

To guide thy girlish hours ;
When I could give thee counsels wise,
And solemn morals could devise

From butterflies and flowers.

It seems but yesterday — for thou
Still wear'st, unfaded, on thy brow,

The first gay wreaths of youth ;
And fragrant, round thy spirit, cling
The earliest blossoms of its spring,

Its purity and truth !
42

326 POEMS.

Yet, though a quick, short hour it seem,
It hath been long enough for dream

On dream to pass away ;
And best and brightest hopes of mine —
(Is it not so, with some of thine ?) —

Have come, and had their day.

Yes — mine have come, deceived, and gone,
And others, that I look upon

As boding better things,
Will, likely, cheat and fade as well,
That other years a tale may tell,

Like that which this one brings.

But — 'mid the varying shapes of change,
The one that seems to me most strange,

Is that myself have known ;
That I, who set me to impart
Sage lessons how to rule thy heart,

Can scarce keep whole my own !

In time of eld, when fairies trod,
Beneath the moon, the dewy sod,

Or thronged the woodland dells,
A woful plight was his, I ween,
Who saw them dancing round the green,

Or heard the elfin bells.

No sleep-shut eye there was, for him,
No welcome rest for weary limb,

Till all that night was gone ;

POEMS. 327

Where'er the elfin coursers neighed,
Where'er the bells their music made,
He followed, fated, on !

kind, the fairies of our days,
Than those, the tiny greensward fays,

Whose charm with darkness went ;
For, now, alike 'neath moon and sun,
The witching process once begun,

Its spells are never spent !

It were not ill, that thou shouldst hold
Small truce of mercy with the bold,

Who onward press and dare ;
But those of us who, from afar,
Gaze on thee, as men watch a star,

Deserve that thou shouldst spare.

'Tis not our fault that we have eyes,
And, if thy soft and low replies

Charm, more than music can,
'Tis in our own despite we hear,
And wherefore should one pay so dear

For being only man ?

Sometimes the fear upon me gains,

That, when fair maidens forge their chains,

They reck not whom they bind ;
Like Romans at the triumph's arch,
They little care what captives march

In pensive ranks behind !

328 POEMS.

I've heard of one who, hour by hour,
In twilight grove and evening bower,

Smiled when a lover wooed,
Although she knew Endymion's moon
Would wed him, from the skies, as soon

As she to whom he sued.

She would not bid him go his ways —
She loved his worship and his praise,

Although she loved him not ;
She listened, while she liked to hear,
And, when it palled upon her ear,

She doled him out his lot !

But, wherefore vex thy gentler mind,
With tales of maidens thus unkind ?

Oh, never thine such sin !
Thou wouldst have let him love away,
And live in hope, some lucky day

By patient praise to win.

And — praising — loving — hoping — still,
His future hanging on thy will,

Without one vow of thine —
He might have lived sweet ages o'er,
And, till he asked for something more,

Have felt suspense divine !

And — after all — most strange it were,
In him who could not, patient, bear
Long years of doubt, to see —

POEMS. 329

Though dim and far, and struggling through
A darker night than chaos knew —
One hope of winning thee !

Such sights and hopes to them I leave,
Who fancy's webs can, willing, weave,

To snare themselves withal ;
'Tis mine to see with other's eyes,
And, if 'twere mine to deal the prize,

Thou know'st where it would fall !

But there 's no cause why thou shouldst chide,
And surely none why I should hide,

'Neath cautious words and cold,
The feelings kind, whose friendly glow
It would be strange thou shouldst not know,

Though it were left untold !

Of all the charms existence lends —
Youth, beauty, wit, and love, and friends —

There 's none thou dost not share ;
Yet, though 'tis, thus, an idle thing
To add so poor an offering

As one sad sinner's prayer —

I pray that, like the Prophet's palm,
Which vocal made each breeze of balm

O'er Eden's bow'rs that past,
Thy tree of life may, all day long,
Pour forth from every leaf a song,

Each sweeter than the last !

330 POEMS.

TO

I've been a dreamer all my days,

Yet ne'er a dream came true —
And 'twould be strange if I could raise

A dreamland sprite for you ;
You — through whose common, daylight air,

More gladsome visions sweep,
Than other, luckiest mortals, dare

To hope for — e'en in sleep !

Dream as you will then — brighter far

Your own pure thoughts, than all
The forms that round the midnight's car

A wizard's wand could call !
I only beg that, not too glad

Nor bright, your dreams may be ;
For then — the chance were very bad,

That you should dream of me !

TO

Along a lonely walk I strayed —

My thoughts far off, with doubtful things,
When, o'er my path, I saw there played

" A gentle bird on azure wings ! "

POEMS. 331

He bent him from the heights of air —
Stooped to the earth, as if to light —

Poised him before me — lingered there —
Then passed away — like all things bright !

I watched him, till I saw him fold

His wings, the distant corn among,
Where, from a stalk of bending gold,

I heard him lift his happy song.

I went my ways — I could but feel,

How often to my lot 'twas given,
To see, far from my pathway, wheel

The brightest messengers from Heaven !

And yet — why should the bird to me
Bring down the hues that clothe the sky,

When o'er my path there bent no tree,
In whose green bosom he could lie ?

When of the fields whose treasures lay,

Far o'er the glad and teeming plain,
Not mine one golden sheaf, to pay

The music of his gentle strain !

I could not blame him — yet I thought
'Twere sad he should have come, unless

His beauty and his song he'd brought,
My lonely wanderings to bless !

332 POEMS.

TO

I may not love thee ! though the thought,

By honor's ban repressed,
Unbreathed to thee, to man, to Heaven,

Should moulder with my breast !
There is a faith that I should break,
If, from my slumbers I should wake

To bless a dream of thee ;
And though to thee but common dust,
As pure as thou I'll keep that trust,
Betwixt my soul and me !

And yet — 'tis hard thou shouldst not know

What better life were mine,
To worship, if but in my heart

The Deity in thine !
Ah ! couldst thou feel what it has cost
To teach myself that thou art lost

Yet bless where thou art won,
Thou — wouldst not love me — that is past —
But even thou wouldst mourn the cast
That left me thus undone !

POEMS. 333

FKOM CALDERON.

Carlos. The morning's golden light had scarcely flung
A crown upon the sun's returning brow
When, unto her, from whom daylight had sprung,
Mine other sun, I lifted up my vow.
Scarce the night-shadows, tremulous, had hung
Their gloom o'er all things but my passion's glow,
When all my love, upon the garden-wold,
To the fair commonwealth of flowers I told.

The very silence of the evening chill,
The jasmine, in sweet mazes clustering,
The crystal fountain, bubbling at its will,
The brook, that to itself went murmuring,
The air, that on the blossoms breathed still,
And o'er the shrinking leaves leapt, wandering —
All — all was love ! What if at such an hour,
There be a soul in fountain, bird, and flower !

Pasquin. There was an old and grave philosopher
Who dwelt unto himself. A soldier passed
His home one day, and paused to speak with him,
And, after long discourse, the warrior said, —
" Hast thou not seen the fall, then, of our king,
Whose laurels crown him Lord and Arbiter
Of empires most unbounded ? " Quoth the sage,
43

334 POEMS.

" Is not thy king a man ? What hath he then
That I should gaze on him, more than on thee ?

********

Thou see'st yon blossom — gather it, I pray,
And bear it to thy King, and say, I bid him
Make but one single, simple, flower like that !
Then may'st thou learn, that trophies, glories, fame,
Triumph and victory step not beyond
Our mere humanity ; since he, thy Lord,
After so many conquests won, is still
All impotent to frame one little flower,
When every field sprouts myriads ! "

La Cisma de Inglaterra.

NOTES.

[The following notes are the author's own, except where inclosed in
brackets.]

Page 255. The Blessed Hand. There is a legend of an English
monk who died at the monastery of Aremberg, where
he had copied and illuminated many books, hoping
to be rewarded in Heaven. Long after his death
his tomb was opened, and nothing could be seen of
his remains but the right hand with which he had
done his pious work, and which had been miracu-
lously preserved from decay.

[From a personal friend of Mr. Wallis we have
the following account of the circumstances under
which " The Blessed Hand " was written :

" After the war ended, it was found that there
was so much want and destitution throughout the
South, as well as an entire lack of seeds and imple-
ments with which to start in life, that some ladies
in Baltimore conceived the idea of holding a Fair
for the purpose of raising a sum of money which
should be applied to relieving the great want known
to be widespread throughout the South. The result
was the ' Southern Relief Fair/ which proved a
great success, as the expenses were almost nothing,
while all found something to give for the Fair.
The amount realised was about $165.000.

" Among those who entered into the work of the
Fair with great enthusiasm, was Mr. Wallis ; and

335

336 NOTES.

soon after the opening, when he had seen the way in
which the ladies worked, and how true and earnest
was their desire to help those who were suffering,
the legend of ' The Blessed Hand ' came to his mind,
and he wrote the poem here given. He had it
printed and sent to the Fair for sale. So perfectly
did the lines agree with the feeling that filled every
heart, and so beautiful were they in themselves,
that great numbers of the printed copies were sold."

^Elfric relates a similar miracle in the case of
King Oswald of Northumbria.]

Page 261. The Last of the Hours. In the famous fresco, known
as the Aurora, by Guido Reni, in the Rospigliosi
palace at Rome, the last of the Hours — the farthest
from the chariot of the Sun — wears a darker robe
than her companions, and is the only one whose head
is covered. Her face is by far the most beautiful
in the group, though its expression is pensive.

[Printed in the Metropolitan Magazine, September, 1857.]
" 263. Truth and Reason. Fabricius, in his Bibliotheea
Graeca, mentions the theory of the universe pro-
pounded by Cosmas Indicopleustes, who, among
other things, accounted for the motion of the
heavenly bodies by the assertion that they were
carried round in their orbits by celestial spirits.
August 20, 1849.

" 265. Beauty and Faith. " Guido was so distinguished by
his passionate enthusiasm for the Madonna that he
was supposed to have been favored by a particular
vision which enabled him the more readily to repre-
sent her divine beauty. . . . But, though he painted
lovely Virgins, he went every Saturday to pray
before the little black Madonna della Guardia,
and, as we are assured, held this ancient Eastern
relic in devout veneration." Mrs. Jameson's
Legends of the Madonna.

[Printed in the Metropolitan Magazine, March, 1857.]

NOTES. 337

Page 267. The Exile's Prayer. In his work on the Mind, Dr.
Rush maintains the fact, attested by clergymen of
his acquaintance, that the aged foreigners whom
they attended generally prayed on their death-beds
in their native language, though in many cases
they had not spoken it for fifty or sixty years.

" 268. The first interment in Greenmount Cemetery was that
of an infant. 1845.

" 270. [The Spectre of Colalto was contributed by Mr. Wallis
to The Baltimore Book, a literary miscellany pub-
lished in 1838, and edited by W. H. Carpenter and
T. S. Arthur. To the poem was prefixed the fol-
lowing quotation : — ]

" The White Lady of Avenel is not quite so good
as a real well-authenticated White Lady or spectre
in the Marca Trevigniana, who has been repeatedly
seen. . . . She always appeared upon particular
occasions, before the deaths of the family, &c. . . .
She was a girl attendant, who one day, dressing the
hair of a Countess of Colalto, was seen by her mis-
tress to smile upon her husband, in the glass. The
Countess had her shut up in the wall of the castle,
like Constance de Beverley. She is described as
very beautiful and fair. It is well authenticated."
BYRON, Letter 463.

" 277. In Fort Warren. [Lines written on the occasion of
the release of several Confederate officers, fellow-
prisoners of the author.]

« 278. Worship. April 29, 1852.

" 280. Dreams. 1836.

" 283. Life. October, 1836.

" 289. Christmas Eve at Sea. On board ship Argo, Decem-
ber 24, 1846.

" 294. "The Lord Gave." January 22, 1854.

" 296. " And the Lord hath taken away." Annapolis, Janu-
ary 14, 1856.

" 298. Memnon. September 19, 1850.

338 NOTES.

Page 299. God's Acre. The Germans call a grave-yard Gottes
Acker, or " God's Acre," and Friedhof, the " Peace-
yard."

" 299. Starlight. September 20, 1853.

" 300. Quo Fata Trahunt. January 10, 1854.

" 301. For an Album. I was requested to write some verses
in the album of a charming little girl. I wrote
the first of the following pieces, and did not insert
it, because I found on examination that there was
another, by another hand, in the volume, with pretty
nearly the same application of its moral. It was
suggested by an engraving of a landscape in the
album.

" 302. For an Album. These lines, suggested by another
engraving, which represented a butterfly upon a
bunch of cut flowers, were returned with the volume.

" 306. To a Friend. In answer to a poem written by a friend
on Campbell's lines —

" To live in hearts we leave behind,

Is not to die." October 10, 1852.

.'J*. '

" 310. To a Friend. These verses were inclosed in a letter
to my friend, James W. Miller, of New Orleans,
with whom I had spent a good many very happy
hours at Pigeon Hills. When the letter containing
them reached New Orleans, he was dead. Sit illi
terra levis ! December 23, 1838.

" 312. No More. Madame de Stael, I think it is, who says
that the words " no more " are the sweetest in the
English language^ 1841.

" 314. The Curfew. October 1, 1845.

" 317. The Fount. An answer to the following lines in a
friend's letter : —

"As the weary traveller draweth nigh
To a spring which refresheth his longing eye,
And joyfully bendeth o'er the brink
Of the limpid and crystal stream to drink

NOTES. 339

Yet starts to see, 'neath the wave so clear,
The naked, loathsome clay appear —

Even so the lake of Human Love,
While reflecting the tints from the sky above,
Will often seem, to the distant sight,
Like a pure and fathomless sea of light ;
Yet the ripples dance in fantastic wreath
O'er the shoals of selfishness hid beneath."

August 21, 1849.

AC Wallis, Severn Teackle

8 Writings

W2?

1896

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